Information about the Bulletin

Responsibilities 

Composition of the Editorial Board

The editorial board of the Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée consists of an editor-in-chief, a person responsible for critiques and the administration. 

Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Sara Cotelli
Université de Neuchâtel
Centre de langues
Av. du 1er-Mars 26
2000 Neuchâtel
sara.cotelli@unine.ch

Responsible for Critiques: Dr. Gilles Merminod

Administration: Florence Wälchli
Centre de linguistique appliquée & Chaire de linguistique française
Université de Neuchâtel
Pierre-à-Mazel 7
CH-2000 Neuchâtel

Scientific Committee

VALS-ASLA's executive board acts as the bulletin's scientific committee. Proposals for thematic issues are submitted to the editor-in-chief (see “Guidelines for Thematic Issue Proposals”), who evaluates them and requests more specific details if necessary. Subsequently, the editor-in-chief presents the proposals to VALS-ASLA's executive board for assessment. 

Publishing a Thematic Issue

Once the proposal for the publication of a thematic issue has formally been approved, it is the editorship’s responsibility to find authors and to ensure that they submit their articles on time. Furthermore, the editorship is responsible for corresponding with the authors and for keeping the Bulletin’s editorial board up to date about this correspondence. In addition, the editorship ensures that the authors receive and comply with the layout requirements provided by the editorial board.

Guidelines for Thematic Issue Proposals 

The Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée publishes original research papers in the field of Applied Linguistics in English, German, French and Italian. 

Every researcher may submit a proposal for a thematic issue of the Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée by sending it to the bulletin’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Sara Cotelli (sara.cotelli@unine.ch). The editor-in-chief will forward the proposal to VALS-ASLA's executive board, which acts as the journal’s scientific committee. 

The editorial content at the editor’s disposal consists of approximately 170 pages, allowing each article about 15 pages.

Possibilities for submitting a proposal:

1. Suggesting a specific theme
The Bulletin does not publish conference or workshop proceedings. However, contributions to conferences or workshops can constitute the basis for a thematic issue. If VALS-ASLA’s executive board accepts the proposal, the editor(s) will initiate a call for papers via the usual channels (mandatorily including the VALS-ASLA newsletter) for the dissemination of information. The editor(s) will then select the articles to be published (8 to 10 in total) and ensure that there is a certain balance between the languages of the contributions English, German, French and Italian.

2. Suggesting results of a research project
Publishing results of national or international research projects does not require a call for papers via the usual channels for the dissemination of information. The editor(s) should emphasise the particular methodological characteristics of the research project from a scientific point of view, present a sufficient number of articles and avoid monolingual issues.

If a proposal is accepted by VALS-ASLA’s executive board, the editor(s) will be officially put in charge of an issue of the Bulletin. The editor-in-chief will send all the necessary information for producing the issue to the editor(s) (schedule, editorial guidelines, procedure of the “double-blind peer-review”, etc.).

Reviewing Procedure 

All articles published in the Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée are evaluated by means of a double-blind peer review. The procedure is as follows:

1. The editorship submits a list of reviewers for the double-blind peer review (one per article) to the editorial board. In a next step, the editor-in-chief will validate this list and complete the document by adding a second list with further reviewers (one per article). In order to ensure the highest possible quality, the editorial board engages the services of distinguished experts from the national and international research community to review articles in their specific subject area. The editorship is provided insight into the second list. 

2. Authors submit their articles to the editorship, who then forwards them to the editor-in-chief. In order to make sure that every article is reviewed by two people, the editor-in-chief sends an anonymised version of the articles to reviewers from both lists, considering the reviewers chosen by the editorship as well as the ones chosen by the editor-in-chief. As a result, the reviewers will not get to know the authors’ identities and vice-versa.  

3. Subsequently, the experts' reports are sent to the editor-in-chief, who forwards them to the editorship. The editorship then forwards the reports to the authors.  

Authors whose articles have been accepted with changes have to submit the final version of their article to the editorship, who will make sure that the necessary changes have been implemented. In the final step, the editorship sends the articles to the editor-in-chief. The texts are not subject to an embargo for authors. They receive their formatted text at the end of the editing process and can distribute it on their personal website and in online repositories such as Researchgate.

Open Access policy

All texts published by the Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. The journal is embargoed for six months, after which all issues are freely accessible (see Published Issues).

Guidelines for authors