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We usually avoid shop talk here on Language Log. So those of you who are here for the cartoons may want to move along, since I'm about to (mis-?) use this forum to announce a new journal.

The Journal of Experimental Linguistics is part of the Linguistic Society of America's eLanguage initiative. Like the rest of eLanguage, JEL is an Open Access online journal. Regular publication will begin towards the end of 2009.

JEL is a linguistic "journal of reproducible research", that is, a journal of reproducible computational experiments on topics related to speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously­ published corpus data, or of experiment­-specific data that is published for the occasion. Other relevant categories include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant new publications (including new data and software).

In all cases, JEL articles will be accompanied by executable recipes for re­creating all figures, tables, numbers and other results. These recipes will be in the form of source code that runs in some generally-­available computational environment.

Although JEL is centered in linguistics, we aim to publish research from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology. In this interdisciplinary context, "reproducible research" is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub­field to another.

Publication is in online digital form only, with articles appearing as they complete the review process. A rigorous but rapid process of peer review, designed to take no more than 4-6 weeks from submission to publication, will be supplemented by a vigorously­-promoted system for adding moderated remarks and replies after publication.

The editorial board, in alphabetical order, is Alan Black, Steven Bird, Harald Baayen, Paul Boersma, Tim Bunnell, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, John Coleman, Eric Fosler­-Lussier, John Goldsmith, Jen Hay, Stephen Isard, Greg Kochanski, Lori Levin, Mark Liberman, Brian MacWhinney, Ani Nenkova, James Pennebaker, Stuart Shieber, Chilin Shih, David Talkin, Betty Tuller, and Jiahong Yuan. Mark Liberman is the editor in chief.

My involvement with this idea started with a Language Log post: "Executable Articles", 1/3/2007. There was some further discussion, on the blog and off, and Dieter Stein asked me to organize a special session on "Open Data and Reproducible Research" at the Berlin 6 Open Access conference. The JEL eLanguage proposal followed; the LSA executive committee approved it; after some infrastructure work in the background, we're now ready to start accepting submissions; and JEL should be on the air by the end of the year.

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