For authors and editors
The aim of our pages for authors and editors is to provide you with information to help you prepare a manuscript you wish to submit to us for publication.
Before you prepare your manuscript, please check that your subject matter falls within our specialist area. We specialise in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, atlases, bibliographies and other materials concerned with languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia, and in language learning materials in the region's major lingua francas.
Authors and editors bear certain responsibilities during the production process. These are explained in
which you should download and read before preparing your manuscript. It contains information on the PL production process, wordprocessing requirements, and conventions of style. Manuscripts which do not adhere to these are often returned to their authors or editors for emendation.
Two other documents which you will almost certainly need are:
- The unified stylesheet for linguistics, which provides a standard method of setting out references
- The Leipzig glossing rules, which set out a style and basic abbreviations for use in interlinar examples
If a book is likely to be particularly demanding to typeset because of the complexity of its examples, tables, figures and the like, then we ask the author to seek a publication subsidy from their home insitution or elsewhere in order help defray PL's publication costs.
Occasionally an author or editor asks to be allowed to submit camera-ready copy. This is a challenging enterprise. Please read A guide for Pacific Linguistics authors very carefully before you ask PL’s staff about this. A sample chapter from a PL publication is provided here as an illustration of PL's formatting requirements.
If your intended publication is a dictionary, you should also download A guide for Pacific Linguistics dictionary makers and send us an advance sample prepared in accordance with the guide.
If you intend to edit a volume of papers for publication, please see the notes for editors.
Most PL publications appear as books, but some, especially dictionaries and text collections, appear in electronic form only (usually as PDFs on a disk). Both books and electronic publications have an ISBN.
Authors may wish to submit grammars or dictionaries with linked electronic sound, image or text files. In such cases PL can offer publication in book form with an accompanying disk.
PL accepts only book-length works for publication, not individual papers (this is a change from our former practice in Series A).
In general, we do not commission works, nor do we enter into agreements with authors in advance of receiving the manuscript. However, a prospective author is always welcome to discuss with us whether we might be interested in publishing her/his work.
Royalties are not paid on Pacific Linguistics publications, nor are fees paid to editors.
For copyeditors
If you are working on PL manuscripts please see the page for copyeditors and the PDF file linked to it.