Journal of Pragmatics
Editors’ meeting
in Odense, Monday January 12, 1998
at 10 am (or a bit later – depending on arriving trains and finished exams)



This is not exactly an agenda, since I don’t think that we necessarily should follow a particular order. But since Jacob suggested to call the meeting “crises and how to avoid them”, I tried to put something together that would fit the bill.

· Flow of manuscripts. The recent, quite embarrassing non-occurrence of an important footnote in a Review Article (combined with bad proof reading on the side of the author) poses the question of the flow of manuscript and the quality management. On is almost tempted to go back to the old days when both Jacob and I did an extra proof reading at production time (parallel to the authors’). This is of course (I would say) totally out of the question due to the present size of the operation, but we have to think about how we can avoid similar problems (if we can). Elsevier has now added a facility to the JoP web pages which allows authors to check where in the process their submitted manuscripts are at the moment. I haven’t been able to check it out since you need some code which you get with your acknowledgement letter, and I do not have any item in production right now. This is, in one sense, a great achievement and also scary in many other ways. (I have no idea how detailed the information is that is provided to the authors. I do not assume that the juicy bits are put in, like “Referee B dunned for the third time.”)
 
· General management: the Austin-Odense link (with side-links to Tel Aviv, Munich and Roskilde as well as Oxford and Amsterdam). I think this point has to take up some of our time just in the sense of making everybody sure of what the new procedures actually are. I hope that Vibeke can join us for this and, especially, the next point.
 
· The data base: old, new, and changing. This is really an important sub-point of the former, where a lot of information is needed. Also, I would like to bring up the question how the Special issues can be incorporated into the data base.
 
· Indexing. This is a new idea that Elsevier has decided to introduce for all journals: abstracts are to be accompanied by keywords. We need some policy here: what kind of standard keywords can we suggest? Are there any lists that are appropriate for our purposes? I have had a look at the LLBA Thesaurus of Linguistic Indexing Terms (Copyright 1992). It is not as hopeless as it looks at first sight, but it would certainly need some supplementation.
 
· The future. Are we continuing to expand? How can we divide the workload? How can we best organize the co-operation with the publisher?
 
· The board. We have talked about changes in the masthead and the editorial board several times, and some of them are being implemented, with a minimum of “zaps” and a few “zips”. Is this it for the moment?
 
· The index. We have a published index of the first ten volumes, which is an excellent piece of work (the compilers did a good job, as I found recently when I noticed some inconsistencies between JoP articles and tables of contents, e.g. in volume 1, issue 1 (1977), where the compilers didn’t just follow the (wrong) table of contents). Leo has been working on a continuation on the one hand, and Elsevier is working on some electronic indexing as well, which (at least until recently) was accessible on the WWW, with almost pathetic weaknesses, though. We must make up our mind what we want to have as an index.

I think this is plenty, but of course there will be more suggestions,

Roskilde, January 6, 1998					                Hartmut