About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The journal aims to host research within the field of linguistic typology. It is meant to give space above all, but not exclusively, to studies exploring the crossroads at which linguistic typology meets its closest neighbors. The journal will therefore welcome works dealing especially with the intersections between typology and other areas of linguistics, such as diachrony, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus-based analysis of speech and discourse, language acquisition.

Contributions should be of interest to the community of linguists as a whole, independently of particular specializations or theoretical frameworks.

Papers accepted for publication are selected solely on the basis of scientific quality and scholarly standing.

Section Policy

Submissions are possible for the following types of articles.

Research Articles

Presenting new evidence from empirical and/or theoretical studies at the crossroads between typology and neighbouring fields.

Manifesto articles

Showcasing ongoing research projects at the crossroads between typology and neighboring fields. These can be shorter than research articles and not necessarily based on new data. Their main purpose is to inform about and discuss the state-of-the art of new interdisciplinary endeavors in typology.

Reports from the field

Presenting ongoing work in language documentation and description, discussing original data. Their main purpose is to strengthen the dialogue between on-the-ground and comparative studies on linguistic diversity.

Review articles

Presenting newly published work in neighboring fields within the language sciences and discussing their relevance for research on linguistic diversity. Review articles may also discuss research topics that have been at the center of attention in the last years and provide a critical review of the most relevant publications.

Editorial Articles

Addressing editorial issues regarding the journal or monographic issues. In the latter case, their main purpose is to provide a framing for the topic of the issue and an overview of the articles.

Monographic issues

It is possible to submit a proposal for a Monographic issue, containing Research Articles addressing a common research question or adopting a common methodology. See Section Peer Review Process for the details.

Publication Frequency

The journal has two issues per year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate and free open access. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

The authors of published articles remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories or in AMSActa, the institutional open access repository of the University of Bologna.

Publication data

All publications include the publication data, together with submission and acceptance dates.

All papers within the journal are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at the time of publication.

Authorization for self-archiving

Authors are welcome to post pre-submission versions, the original submitted version of the manuscript (preprint) and the final draft post-refereeing (postprint) on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository or non-commercial subject-based repositories.

Publication fees

The journal has neither submission charges nor article processing fees. Authors publishing in LTC face no financial obligation for the publication of their article.

Peer Review Process

Suitable submissions

When an article is submitted to Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, the Editors in Chief decide whether the focus and scope of the submission are suitable for the journal. If the submission is deemed unsuitable, the author will be informed within a week. If the submission is in line with the journal’s focus and scope, the Editors in Chief will assign themselves or one of the Associate Editors to act as Handling Editor for the submission. Members of the Editorial Board may be consulted at all stages, they may act as Handling Editors, based on their scientific expertise, or they may be consulted in the identification of suitable external reviewers. All submissions are automatically checked with plagiarism software.

Authors have to declare whether a paper has been previously submitted elsewhere, providing details of the outcome of that process and of possible subsequent revisions.

The journal accepts submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, presented at conferences, or disseminated through other informal communication channels. These formats are not considered prior publications, although the authors must have retained the copyright. Authors are encouraged to create a link from any previous posting of their paper to the final published version, if possible.

Monographic issues

It is possible to submit a proposal for a Monographic issue, containing Research Articles addressing a common research question or adopting a common methodology. The proposal must be sent to the principal contact of the Journal and must contain the overall description of the Issue, the abstracts of the papers that are planned to be included, and the expected schedule. The Editors in Chief, Associate Editors and members of the Editorial board will consider the proposal and provide feedback within two weeks.

Once the proposal is accepted, the Guest Editors will be identified as Handling Editors and one journal Editor will be identified as referent for the monographic issue. At this point, the manuscripts will undergo the normal submission process, through a double-blind peer review, according the Journal policy. Each paper will have to be officially accepted by the Guest Editors, in order to be published. The referent Editor will supervise the process and will guarantee for the transparency and compliance with the journal Ethical Policies.

Reviewing process

The reviewing process is handled through the journal platform, which makes it fully traceable and accessible to the Editors. Within a week after being assigned a paper, the Handling Editor will contact two reviewers to evaluate the paper and assess it for clarity in data and literature discussion, methodological soundness, and theoretical significance. Reviewers have two weeks to respond to the invitation. If they do not, new reviewers will be contacted by the Handling Editor. The time reviewers take to react may substantially lengthen the duration of the reviewing process.

Reviewers are asked to send in their reviews four weeks after accepting the invitation, but this is negotiable. They are invited to use a review form to evaluate the paper, but using this form is not compulsory. Reviewers are gently and regularly reminded of their invitations to review and of the due dates for their reviews.

The reviewing process is double-blind: reviewers have no access to the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know who the reviewers are. However, if reviewers happen to know the identity of the author, this does not automatically disqualify them as reviewers, but they are asked to inform the Handling Editor. We allow reviewers to disclose their identity to authors if they think that this will help improve the paper by a personal discussion.

During submission, authors may suggest and exclude reviewers for their submission, and they may justify these proposals. The Editors are free (but not obliged) to contact suggested reviewers. They will not contact excluded reviewers to review a submission.

Members of the editorial and scientific boards are allowed to submit their own papers to the journal. In cases where an author is associated with the journal, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that paper, and another member of the team will be assigned responsibility for overseeing peer review. A competing interest must also be declared within the submission and any resulting publication.

The reviewers who collaborated to the articles selection will be listed and thanked in a dedicated page in the journal website every three years.

Editorial decisions and revisions

Once the Handling Editor receives all the reviews, an editorial decision is made. In case of conflicting reviews, a third review may be necessary to evaluate the submission correctly.

If the editorial decision is “publish with minor revisions”, “publish with major revisions”, or “revise and resubmit”, authors are asked to provide a detailed document explaining whether and how their revised submission has taken the reviewers’ comments into account. The revised version should ideally be resubmitted within 10 weeks after the editorial decision is made, but this is negotiable. In the case of “revise and resubmit”, the revised version and the document detailing the changes will be sent to the initial reviewers, unless the author can demonstrate that one of the reviewers is biased against the paper. Additional reviewers may also be invited at this point, at the discretion of the Editor.

Accepted and conditionally accepted submissions, i.e. where the editorial decisions is “publish as is”, “publish with major revisions”, or “publish with minor revisions”, are not sent out for review again once the author submits the revised version. The Editor makes an editorial decision based on the revised paper and the author’s reply to the reviewers. The Editor may still contact one or more reviewers regarding specific questions.

In case of conflicting reviews, or if an author formulates justified objections to the review(s), the Editors reserve the right to invite an additional reviewer who will have access to all versions of the paper and all reviews in order to advise the Editors.

Ethics

Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics.

The code is inspired by the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular to the COPE Core Practices and its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

All parties involved in the editorial process, editorial staff members, authors, reviewers must know and apply the ethical principles of that document.

Data Policy

When relevant, authors are encouraged to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated to their articles in trusted data repositories, according to the international best practices and data management guidelines.

Detailed information is reported in the AlmaDL Journals Data Policy.

Authors who are affiliated to the University of Bologna can publish their data in AMSActa, the institutional research data repository.

Indexing and abstracting

The Journal is indexed in the following databases and search engines:

Archiving Policy

As part of AlmaDL Journals, the Journal adopts a strategy to ensure long term preservation of the published content. Please see the archiving policy of the publishing service AlmaDL Journals.

Publisher

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
Alma Diamond – open scholarly communication

Via Zamboni 33,
40126 - Bologna (Italy)

Ownership

Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica – FICLIT
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Zamboni, 32
40126 - Bologna (Italy)

Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture moderne – LILEC
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Cartoleria 5
40124 - Bologna (Italy)