People behind the eSeries | Information for Authors | Technical information

About the eSeries

Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English is published open-access by the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG) at the University of Helsinki. VARIENG is active in the fields of corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, dialectology, contact linguistics, and typology. While the series is primarily aimed for professional linguists and philologists, it also showcases current research in our field to interested readers beyond our field. The purpose of the series is to encourage the development of new cross-disciplinary methodologies, in particular interaction between quantitative and qualitative methods – and to encourage researchers to take advantage of the opportunities for multimedia presentation inherent to electronic publishing. The series serves as a home for publications that illustrate an innovative and cross-disciplinary approach to theory and methodology.

The innovativeness of content will be reflected in the technical presentation. We encourage authors to make use of hypertext and multimedia content such as high quality images (full-color graphs and charts, facsimiles of manuscripts and early published books, maps, etc.), audio and video streaming (dialect samples, video samples) and flash animation (interactive graphics). It is also possible to make available raw research data in the form of spreadsheet material, wordlists, concordance tables, etc., and to include powerpoint presentations and freely available software. We provide authors with a technical style sheet, but to guarantee a uniformly high level of quality, some assistance in technical editing is available.

Peer review

Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English is an internationally peer-reviewed online publication. Its academic quality is guaranteed by anonymous refereeing of all articles. The Editorial Board considers whether the proposals to the series fit its aim and scope. If approved, the volume editors submit the individual papers to peer review. With monographs, organizing peer review is the duty of the Editorial Board, assisted by members of the Advisory Board. The reviewers are also instructed to comment on and make suggestions concerning the use of hypertextual features and multimedia using a review form designed for that purpose. Before publication, each volume is approved by the Editorial Board or representatives appointed by it (clearance review).

Open access policy and citation guidelines

The eSeries is published online free of any charges of any kind. We at VARIENG encourage colleagues and all other interested readers to enjoy the volumes and to refer to them in academic contexts. Please note that our open access policy does not imply that the authors of individual articles or VARIENG as an institution have relinquished any of the intellectual property rights to the articles. While you are free to cite the articles and to provide hyperlinks to them from other websites, it is not acceptable to copy any of the content to other websites or to present it as your own work. If you wish to republish articles or parts thereof, please contact the managing editor of the series. We will at all times insist on proper citation.

To cite individual articles in the eSeries, please follow the following format or an appropriate variation thereof:

Last name, first name. Year of publication. “Name of article”. Name of Volume (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English XX), ed. by first name last name & first name last name. Helsinki: VARIENG. URL.

For example:

Denison, David. 2007. “Playing tag with category boundaries”. Annotating Variation and Change (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1), ed. by Anneli Meurman-Solin & Arja Nurmi. Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/denison/.