In 2021, the phonetics community celebrated 50 years of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, including 20 years of publication with Cambridge University Press (CUP). However, JIPA has existed since 1886 under various other names, and so this anniversary is only the icing on a very rich phonetic cake. JIPA has been edited over the years by many important contributors to our discipline – A. C. Gimson, John Wells, Anthony Bladon, Ian Maddieson, Peter Ladefoged, John Esling, Adrian Simpson, and Amalia Arvaniti – all of whom have shaped the journal in their own ways, to make it the very special and unique publication it is today.
In 2019, the new editorial team started at JIPA, with myself (Marija Tabain) as editor-in-chief, and Professor Jody Kreiman as co-editor. This new arrangement was prompted by the increasing number of submissions to JIPA, and in particular by the growing importance and complexity of the Illustration submissions. As such, Professor Kreiman oversees the regular submissions, and I oversee the Illustration submissions. In addition, as editor-in-chief, I liaise with our publisher, Cambridge University Press, and with our society, the International Phonetic Association (IPA).
Due to the increasing submissions at JIPA, our team of associate editors has grown considerably. Working with me on the Illustrations are Professors Marc Garellek and Matthew Gordon; and working with Professor Kreiman on the regular submissions are Professors Oliver Niebuhr, Marzena Żygis, and Alexei Kochetov (who as I write is handing over to Professor Sonya Bird), with the recent addition of Professor Patrycja Strycharczuk to this team. I would also like to thank Professors Alexis Michaud, Tine Mooshammer and Jelena Krivokapić for seeing out the submissions assigned to them as associate editors prior to the start of the current team. Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to a previous editor-in-chief, Professor Adrian Simpson, who mentored me during my inital months and eased me into the workload, given that the start of my term at JIPA co-incided with the end of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Melbourne in 2019, for which I had been general chair.
There are two other important members of the JIPA team in addition to the various editors, and that is our editorial assistant Dr Adele Gregory, and our audio manager, Mr Andre Radtke. Dr Gregory (who is paid with funds provided by CUP) manages the journal submissions; and Mr Radtke (who is paid with funds provided by the IPA) oversees quality of the supplementary audio materials submitted to the Journal (this is primarily for the Illustrations, but increasingly also for regular submissions). We are also assisted by many staff at Cambridge University Press – in journal management and publishing, production, copy editing, typesetting, and marketing – to whom we are all very grateful.
In 2021 we awarded the inaugural JIPA Most Illustrative Illustration Prize to Kalasha (Bumburet Variety), by authors Alexei Kochetov, Paul Arsenault, Jan Heegård Petersen, Sikandar Kalas & Taj Khan Kalash. The other Illustrations on the shortlist were Ambel (by Laura Arnold), Kejom (Babanki – by Matthew Faytek and Pius W. Akumbu) and Zhushan Mandarin (by Yiya Chen and Li Guo). It was nice to see this list represent languages from all over the world, respectively Pakistan, Indonesia (West Papua), Cameroon and China. The shortlist was put together by the editors overseeing the Illustrations (i.e. myself with Professors Garellek and Gordon), and voted on by the entire editorial board. The process generated some very positive feedback for all Illustrations on the shortlist, and there is already a shortlist for the second Most Illustrative Illustration prize which will be awarded in 2024.
The Most Illustrative Illustration prize was designed not only to highlight the excellent work that is done on many languages of the world, but also to bring to the attention of the phonetics community the richer standards we are expecting from authors of Illustrations, in terms of quantitative analysis of phonetic data. In addition to expecting vowel formant plots in Hertz, we are also asking authors to provide quantitative data on voice onset time and closure duration for plosives; Fast Fourier Transform spectra for fricatives; and a more extensive prosody section, including duration, energy and fundamental frequency measures for stress, as well as fundamental frequency contours for lexical pitch. We also expect quantitative analysis using relevant acoustic measures for any other sounds of interest, such as implosives or ejectives, or any linguistic differences in voice quality. Whilst we understand that it is not always possible to record multiple speakers, we expect that it is possible to record multiple tokens for quantitative analysis.
Many readers will already be aware that there is an interactive map of the JIPA Illustrations available at https://richardbeare.github.io/marijatabain/ipa_illustrations_all.html, which is regularly updated thanks to Professor Richard Beare, with assistance from IPA webmaster Kayoko Yanagisawa and audio manager Andre Radtke. In addition, Professor Beare and Mr Kirk Miller have ensured that Illustrations are now linked to the relevant Wikipedia page for the language – this is a service to Wikipedia readers wanting to learn more about a language, and also serves as publicity for JIPA in the broader community.
There are several other updates regarding journal management. Firstly, JIPA no longer publishes book reviews – this was a decision made in light of the increasing number of regular submissions, and also in light of the fact that book reviews are published in many other online forums. With the help of CUP, we have also updated our instructions to authors, as well as updated general information on our website; we have moved to a new journal template (currently being implemented); we have mandated ORCiD numbers for corresponding authors; we have moved to a new author agreement platform (Ironclad); and we have moved away from yearly page budgets. This last point is particularly relevant for the future, since JIPA is in the process of becoming an online-only, fully open access journal. I would like to thank CUP and the IPA who are both overseeing this important change to JIPA. Open access publication is something that has been desired by the broader academic community for some time, and this move is being facilitated by the large number of read and publish agreements that CUP has been signing with many universities and other organizations and institutions around the world. Indeed, in 2022, 65% of JIPA articles were published as open access, so one would expect that this transition to fully open access should not be daunting. At the same time, one must recognize that full open access comes at the cost of not being able to publish a hard copy of the Journal, since hard copies are much more costly to produce than online only issues. I’m sure that readers who share with me a dystopian view of the future will regret this decision, and I hope that these readers will think to keep the hard copies that they print out for their own personal reading.
Figure 1 shows the number of submissions and acceptances to JIPA from 2019 to mid-2023. The number of original submissions excludes revisions, and is reported by initial submission year; by contrast, the acceptances are reported by final decision year. As can be seen, JIPA’s acceptance rate is generally around one third of submitted papers.
Figure 1 Submissions
As an indication of the wide appeal of JIPA internationally, in 2022 accepted papers came from 11 different countries – Australia, Canada, China, Ethiopia, France, Iran, Lithuania, Qatar, Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States of America. Acceptance rates for these countries were 100%, with the exception of Australia, China and the United States, for which acceptance rates varied between 40% and 67%.
Figure 2 shows the time to publication in the same period of time (i.e. 2019 to mid-2023). It can be seen that time to first decision is generally around three months; and time to final decision is generally around nine months. The time to online publication (FV or FirstView in the graph) has been steadily decreasing as CUP puts improved processes in place, and is currently around two months.
Figure 2 Time to publication
In summary, JIPA continues to grow and to improve. Throughout this growth and change, the team at JIPA remains committed to supporting research on the very many languages of the world. We are proud to be able to contribute to the flagship publication of the International Phonetic Association.
