Journal Policies

Editorial Oversight

The Editors-in-Chief of STAR are appointed for a term of five years, which is renewable upon mutual agreement between the Editorial Board and the Editors-in-Chief.

The Editors-in-Chief can resign from their position at any time provided this resignation is announced six months in advance.

All editorial decisions for the journal are made by the Editors-in-Chief in consultation with each other.

The journal does not currently have any associate editors but the Editors-in-Chief do appoint guest editors in the case of  Special Collections (see the 'Special Collections' section below), whose editorial practices and decisions are overseen by the Editors-in-Chief at all points in the journal's workflow.

Editorial Scrutiny of Submissions

When an article is submitted to STAR, the editors first decide whether the focus and scope of the submission is suitable for the journal. If the submission is deemed unsuitable, the submission will be desk-rejected and the author will be informed within two weeks. If the submission is in line with STAR’s focus and scope, one of the editors will be assigned to act as Handling Editor for the submission. All submissions are automatically checked with plagiarism software.

The editors of STAR ask that authors declare whether a paper has been previously submitted elsewhere, as well as to provide details of what the outcome of that process was, and how subsequent revisions have taken into account those reviews. STAR has a policy of rejecting papers that do not sufficiently respond to reviews from previous submission processes, unless authors are able to explain and justify why they did not adapt their work.

Editorial Board

This journal cultivates a broad and experienced Editorial Board that contains members from across different nations, academic institutions, genders and demographics. Potential board members are approached by the editorial team while keeping this diversity in mind.

Peer Review Process

For papers within the scope of the journal, the Handling Editor will contact three peer reviewers (two for short remarks) to evaluate the paper and assess it for clarity, validity, novelty, and sound methodology. Reviewers have two weeks to respond to the invitation. If they do not, new reviewers will be contacted by the Handling Editor until a quorum of three is reached. The time reviewers take to react may substantially lengthen the duration of the reviewing process.

Reviewers are asked to send in their reviews six weeks after accepting the invitation, but this is negotiable. They are invited to use a review form to evaluate the paper following the instructions given on the electronic review form on the journal's online platform, however reviews can be uploaded as a separate document during this process. Reviewers are gently and regularly reminded of their invitations to review and the due dates for their reviews. In total, it takes an average of two months for the author to receive initial editorial feedback from peer review from the point of their article's submission.

The reviewing process is double-anonymous: reviewers have no access to the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know who the reviewers are. We find that double-anonymous peer review allows reviewers to be candid (an absolute must in peer reviewing) and allows for authors (especially early career authors) to have their work evaluated without favour and prejudice that might come from disclosing name and affiliation. However, if reviewers happen to know the identity of the author, this does not automatically disqualify them as reviewers. This is due to the small size of the field of theoretical syntax, where leading researchers may be able to identify work based on its written style and content regardless of the author's anonymizing efforts. In such instances, the journal cannot guarantee fully double-anonymous review, however we believe that research benefits from being reviewed by the best possible candidate. In these cases, too, editors will also ensure that any conflicts of interest between the reviewer and author are avoided where evident.

According to its double-anonymous peer review policy, STAR does not publish peer review reports alongside articles, or the names of the peer reviewers who have undertaken review of the article. Anonymised peer review data is held securely and privately in the journal’s publishing platform for the author to access.

Full length research articles generally require three independent reviews while short ‘remarks’ require only two.

During submission, authors can suggest preferred and non-preferred reviewers for their submission, and they may justify these proposals. Handling Editors create their own list of suggested reviewers without taking author suggestions into account in the first instance. This often leads to suggested reviewers being asked only when the Handling Editor’s first choices are unavailable. If no reviewers on the Handling Editor's list are able to review, the editors may take the author's suggestions into account but are not bound by them; these are discretionary. All suggested reviewers are vetted to avoid conflicts of interest (same institution, supervisory relationship at present or in the past, co-authorship in the recent past) and then selected jointly by the editors. No submission is reviewed exclusively by suggested peer reviewers. Members of the editorial team/board/guest editors are permitted 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 interests statement must also be declared within the submission and any resulting publication.

Peer reviewers, when approached to review, are provided with the title of the article, the abstract, its length and keywords associated with it. On acceptance to review, they are further provided with the anonymized manuscript, figures, and any supplementary materials for the article. Guidance for the content of reviews is given via the journal's online platform and are asked to comment on areas such as the article's fit with the journal's 'Focus and Scope', its structure and argument, language, formatting, and the appropriateness of figure and supplementary files. For re-reviewing, the reviews of the previous round together with the authors’ response to reviewer comments are provided.

Peer Review Editorial Decisions and Revisions

When all reviews are in, the Editors make an editorial decision, usually based on three reviews. In exceptional cases, or in the case of short remarks, a decision may be made with two reviews. This is necessary when, for example, a third review fails to materialize after repeated reminders, and time is too short to invite a new reviewer.

If the editorial decision is 'major revisions', 'minor revisions', or 'accept without revisions', authors are asked to provide a detailed document explaining how their revised submission has taken reviewers’ comments into account. This document will be read both by the reviewers (in the case of 'major revisions') and the editors. The revised version should ideally be resubmitted within 10 weeks of the editorial decision having been made, but this is negotiable. In the case of 'major revisions', 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; for example, making demands that the author revises their paper not consistent with other research in the field. Additional reviewers may also be invited at this point if the initial reviewer is unavailable, or at the discretion of the Handling Editor. In principle, (conditionally) accepted submissions requiring only minor revisions are not sent out for review again once the author submits the revised version. The editors make an editorial decision based on the revised paper and the author’s response to the reviewers. The editors may still contact one or more reviewers regarding specific questions. In principle, the editors will allow for a maximum of three rounds of revision for a paper.

In a case of conflicting reviews, or if an author formulates justified objections to the review(s), the editors reserve the right to invite a fourth, ‘Solomonic’ reviewer who will have access to all versions of the paper and all reviews in order to advise the Editors. At all times, the editors try to facilitate the conversation between authors and reviewers as best they can.

Organization and Governance

The foundation Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), a nonprofit foundation (‘Stichting’) under Dutch law, is the legal owner of the Journal’s main title, STAR: Linguistic Theory and Research.

For further information on the journal's ownership, governance and oversight, please see the journal's full 'Governance' statement.

Business Practices

Advertising

This journal does not permit any advertising on the journal’s website and will never consider requests of any kind from other parties wishing to advertise in the journal or on its webpages.

Direct Marketing

This journal does not engage in any direct marketing practices.

The publisher, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), employs a Marketing Officer who undertakes general marketing activities for the publisher including the promotion of its journals. The Marketing Officer does not, however, engage in direct marketing for any OLH journals and this does not affect the editorial decisions of OLH journals in any way.

Other Revenue

STAR's long-term publishing and hosting costs are funded by OLH’s Library Partnership Subsidy Model. The journal also accepts Voluntary Author Contributions(VACs) for articles.

Additional fundraising for the journal is ongoing; STAR currently has preliminary commitments from the van Riemsdijk Foundation, GLOW, and LAGB. The journal is further looking into libraries and linguistics departments to provide funding. These funds are to assist with copyediting and administrative editorial costs.

These streams of additional revenue this journal receives do not affect the editorial decisions of the journal in any way.

Preprint Policy

The journal is happy to accept 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.

STAR allows authors to deposit draft versions of their paper into a suitable preprint server, on condition that the author agrees to the below terms:

  • The author retains copyright to the preprint and developed works from it, and is permitted to submit it to the journal;
  • The author declares that a preprint is available within the cover letter presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint;
  • The author acknowledges that having a preprint publicly available means that the journal cannot guarantee the anonymity of the author during the review process, even if they anonymise the submitted files;
  • Should the submission be published, the authors are expected to update the information associated with the preprint version to show that a final version has been published in the journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.

While not strictly preprints, papers previously published in conference proceedings can be submitted, provided they have been suitably revised or expanded, and have not been subject to peer review by the proceedings' editors. Authors are encouraged to create a link from any prior posting of their paper to the final published version in STAR, if possible.

Data and Reproducibility

STAR requires authors to make all data, stimuli, and data analysis scripts associated with their submission openly available at the time of submission, in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). All original research submitted to STAR must include a data availability statement. Data availability statements should state where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, with links to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study. The scope of this requirement is the minimal amount of data and any necessary scripts necessary to replicate the findings reported in the article. Exceptions will be considered on a case by case basis. When it is not possible to share research data publicly, this restriction should be clearly stated.

Authors are encouraged to use the Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics, both in the bibliography and in the text of their manuscript.

In addition, data should be linked to from a 'Data Accessibility Statement' within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. If data is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. When depositing data for a submission, the below should be considered:

  • The repository the data is deposited in must be suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model;
  • The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g., CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if a valid reason (e.g., legal) is present;
  • The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format;
  • The deposited data must have been labelled in such a way that a third party can make sense of it (e.g., sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file); 
  • Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymized whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian); 
  • A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given. 

A list of data repositories is available here. 

Upload the files to your chosen open repository and make note of the DOI that they will provide. Most suitable for datasets or information that act as foundations to the research being published. This option makes the files more discoverable and more citable. We recommend an open repository such as osf.io, which allows you to create a "project" under which you can upload relevant files (datasets, analysis scripts, experimental materials, etc.). The project will be associated with a unique DOI. You can then include in your manuscript a citation of the OSF entry and/or a link to the project page on OSF, to direct interested readers to the supplementary materials.

During review, please be sure that the link to the repository is anonymized to maintain a fully double-anonymous review process. Instructions for doing this on the OSF may be found here. If you would like to learn more about best practices for ensuring reproducibility, see Laurinavichyute and Vasishth (2021). Please contact the journal's editors if you would like more information or advice about hosting your data on an open repository.

If you have data, appendices, or any other supplementary material (tests, protocols etc.) that you would like to see published alongside your paper, you can upload these files to the journal's online submissions platform, Janeway, and inform the Handling Editor. During the typesetting process, the editors can assign these materials their own DOI so that they are accessible to readers. Note that these materials will not be copyedited or typeset: their appearance and format is entirely the author's responsibility.

Special Collections

STAR also publishes Special Collections, which do not differ from the journal's standard publishing cycle.

Special collections may be proposed to the editors by (teams of) guest editors. When evaluating Special Collection proposals, the editorial team looks for strong thematic unity.

All proposals are evaluated by the STAR editors. Once a proposal has been reviewed, the submitter(s) of the proposal will be informed of the Editors’ decision. The proposal should be sent to editorial@star-linguistics.org in a single file that does not exceed 15 pages, and contain the following information:

  1. Introduction.
  2. Title of the proposed Special Collection and the names and affiliations of the guest editors.
  3. The goal of the proposal.
  4. The background of the proposal.
  5. Its relevance to current research.
  6. A list of contributors, titles, and 400-word abstracts of each contribution.
  7. Five recent key publications on the topic.
  8. The projected length of the Special Collection (a maximum of 10 articles or 100,000 words).
  9. A proposed timeline.

We also ask for the proposal to provide (approximate) dates for the following:

  1. The deadline for the first submission.
  2. The completion of the first review round (max. 6 months after the acceptance date).
  3. The deadline for revised manuscripts.
  4. The completion of the review and revision process.

The total time from acceptance to finalization of a Special Collection should not exceed 12 months.

Guest Editors are responsible for the editorial processes for their Special Collection, and the Editor-in-Chief assists and monitors all Guest Editors' editorial decisions and practices.