After two townhall meetings, we decided on a revised format for the GLOW colloquium.
HERE are the new guidelines for organizing a GLOW conference, reached by the GLOW board after taking into consideration the issues and suggestions raised at the town hall meetings. The conclusions reflect, on the one hand, the need to keep up a venue for substantial (and hence long) contributions in generative grammar and, on the other hand, make GLOW significantly more inclusive—make it more accessible to junior scholars and to non-core approaches to generative grammar.
GLOW proceedings: looking for task force!
The questionnaire results as well as the town hall discussions have revealed that the community finds it important to have GLOW proceedings. We agree with this assessment, and while no definitive decision has been made, the board has agreed on an initial concept, sketched and motivated below. To develop the details and reach a concrete procedure for the GLOW proceedings, we would like to form a task force to handle this further. If you are interested to be part of the task force (note this will not bind you to be involved in the actual proceedings later), please let us know.
Proposal:
Although Glossa (special collections called “GLOWing papers”) is considered a good venue, there are significant limitations in the number of submissions, which in turn poses a challenge of the selection process; note that the community is skeptical about the GLOW board deciding on which papers should be included in the selected proceedings.
Taking the above into account and considering that GLOW is to become a more inclusive conference, the GLOW board would like to support a more inclusive proceedings model, too, along the lines of SuB, WCCFL, or SALT. More particularly, what we have in mind is a sizeable collection of short papers (say, up to 15 pages), non-reviewed, but copyedited, published online and diamond open access (free to both author and reader, accessible via a stable repository), within about a year from the conference. The publisher would be the organizing institution, the editorial team could be composed of senior and junior scholars; for the latter this would be an opportunity to gain experience. The editors would only check the papers for copyediting and stylesheet adherence, the editing itself would be up to the authors. This is basically the model applied in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung. We are aware that a non-reviewed publication is worth less than a reviewed one, let alone a journal publication. However, as has been pointed out multiple times, good papers have a high chance of finding their way into journals even without GLOW proceedings. And while non-reviewed publications often “score” less points in official evaluation systems, their quality is easily recognized by peer experts, which in turn can translate to higher chances in the job market for junior people. Finally, speed and inclusiveness are the benefits which we think outweigh the downsides.
