The first volume of the scientific journal Loquens appeared in 2014. However, for those of us who attended the first meetings at the CSIC Phonetics Laboratory, where the journal was conceived and shaped, we can date back its origins to some months before, around 2013. We are therefore thrilled to celebrate Loquens' 10th anniversary this year, which not only marks the publication of volume 10 but also the milestone of having published our 100th article.
In 2013, I was still a PhD candidate at CSIC, and the Phonetics Laboratory was bustling with speech science researchers, junior and senior. I would have never dreamt at that time that ten years later I would join the editorial team of the journal, being voted Editor-in-Chief in March 2023. It is with great enthusiasm that I have undertaken the demanding tasks that this role entails. I hope that this Editorial helps our readers form an idea of the focus and scope with which Loquens was born, on the one hand, and the main changes that the journal has undergone so far, on the other hand. Finally, I would like to point out the main challenges and opportunities that the journal is facing now, in terms of promoting transparency and embracing open science.
Loquens was born with the intention to encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of speech, by removing borders and building bridges between disciplines that can enrich each other. As explained on the journal’s website, Loquens seeks to promote the understanding of the most distinguishing feature of human beings: speech. The complex nature of speech means that it can be approached from many different perspectives which go beyond the limits of the often-isolated fields commonly imposed by academic research. Throughout these 10 years, Loquens has published articles that deal with any and all aspects of the speech sciences: acoustic, articulatory and perceptual phonetics; phonetic variation; phonetic change; methodology of phonetic research; phonological theory, computational phonology, diachronic phonology, historiography of phonic studies; speech technology; clinical phonetics; forensic phonetics, phonetic and phonological acquisition; as well as voice science, which covers phonation, vocal coaching and training, or professional voice.
Loquens is listed in several national and international, specialized and general databases and indexes. Particularly worth mentioning are: Web of Science, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), SCOPUS, ERIH Plus, Dialnet and ÍnDICEs CSIC. It is indexed in Latindex Catalogue 2.0, CWTS Leiden Ranking (Journal indicators), IBZ Online (De Gruyter) and Sherpa Romeo. In addition, Loquens has obtained the FECYT Seal of Quality.
The main changes that the journal has undergone during these years include the publication of one volume with two issues since 2021 (originally, the journal published one issue in January and another one in July), and the migration to an Open Journal System (OJS) platform in August 2023. This migration has enabled an easier submission and review process.
Starting with the next volume, article submission will require a new template, which includes important changes in the author guidelines. A Spanish version and an English version of the template have been available on the journal’s website since December 2023. The main changes are:
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A declaration of competing interest is a new compulsory section of articles.
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An authorship contribution statement is required as well. To ensure transparency, all CSIC journals apply the CRediT taxonomy for identifying authorship contributions based on the assignment of specific roles to research articles. For more information, see “About/Authorship Contribution Policy” on the journal’s website.
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A description of data availability, although optional, is recommended in order to ensure replicability. This section should include a brief description of the type of data deposited in repositories, the name or identification code of the files, the use and distribution licence, and the URL.
Another improvement that we would like to highlight is the decreased time lapse between article submission and acceptance. In volume 10 of Loquens, no more than three months elapsed, on average, between the submission date and the acceptance date (mean: 88.5 days; median: 56 days). Online-first publication typically follows soon after acceptance, along with a short process of editing and proofreading.
I would like to thank all authors of Loquens over these ten years for thinking of our journal for the dissemination of their scientific contributions. I am particularly grateful to the authors of the nine research articles of this volume, for their confidence in the new editorial team. I also extend my thanks to all the subject editors who have helped select the external reviewers responsible for the double-blind reviewing process. Of course, I am thankful to the previous editorial teams who led Loquens during the first nine years.
I would like to finish this Editorial by encouraging our readers to enjoy the rest of the volume and reminding future authors that Loquens is open access and free of charge, with article submission open all year, and three publication formats: PDF, HTML, and XML formats.