About the Journal
Focus and Scope
The journal Verba (Anuario Galego de Filoloxía) publishes linguistic and philological studies annually. Verba appeared for the first time in 1974 with the intention of disseminating philological studies conducted in Galicia and with the aim of devoting particular attention to the Galician language. However, the reception of the journal in Spanish, European and American academic circles opened the way for specialists from various backgrounds –notably from centres on the Spanish peninsula– to broaden the range of subjects and languages of the studies published. Since its foundation, many researchers have helped guide Verbainto areas such as grammar, phonology, lexicon, critical editing, linguistic theory and pragmatics.
Each volume of Verba contains, in addition to new research papers, short notes on specific issues, and book reviews. It encompasses work in the following languages: Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian and English.
In addition to its annual publication, the journal also publishes a collection of monographs as Supplements.
The editors of Verba invite teachers and researchers to disseminate their work through this medium.
The areas of knowledge with which the journal is most directly linked are:
- Romance Philology
- Galician Philology
- Spanish Philology
- Portuguese Philology
- Catalan Philology
- French Philology
- Italian Philology
- General Linguistics
Peer Review Process
Studies received will be revised by a member of the Editorial Board who will determine whether they meet the minimum requirements for publication (thematic areas of the journal, anonymity, formatting, etc.). Non-compliance with the minimum conditions required by the journal will be grounds for the rejection of the work.
Studies that meet the minimum requirements will be evaluated anonymously by two informants, either members of the academic / advisory board of Verba, or specialists in the topic in question. Ultimately, the editorial board will have the final decision.
Each reviewer will prepare a detailed opinion outlining the reasons for the acceptance, revision (following the Journal’s guidelines as regards revision), or rejection of the work under consideration. Throughout the process the anonymity of both authors and reviewers will be preserved.
Communication with the authors will include the reports by the anonymous evaluators. Eventually, a single report will also be sent, written by the editors and based on the forms used by the evaluators.
The average length of time between receiving the text of the study and informing the author of the result of its evaluation will not be more than five months (except in unforeseen circumstances).
The basic evaluation criteria are:
- 1. Relevance to the general subject areas of the journal.
- 2. Originality and scientific relevance of the work (subject, method, data, results, etc.).
- 3. Methodological rigor.
- 4. Formal presentation.
- 1. Editing and organization.
- 2. References.
- 3. Bibliography.
- 5. Conformance to the style conventions of the journal.
Reviewers may recommend: a) acceptance without corrections; (b) acceptance with minor corrections; (c) reworking of the text to be submitted to a second appraisal; (d) rejection. In the case of c), in addition to uploading to the platform a new, rewritten text (on the same “Active submission” page), Authors should send the person responsible for dealing with his work a document which specifies how the suggestions of reviewers have been met. Both the improved version and the document detailing the changes made will be sent again to the reviewers, who will issue a report on the suitability or not of publication within a period of one month. The Editorial Board, within a maximum period of 15 days from the receipt of the new reports, will come to an agreement and give notice of the acceptance or rejection of the article.
Publication Frequency
Annual. In order to avoid unnecessary delays in the editorial process, the Verba editorial team has decided to publish articles individually in a continuous volume throughout the year. This new policy will be adopted as of volume 49 (publication year 2022). Each article will be made available as soon as encoding in JATS and lay-out have been finished. As a consequence, all articles will be paginated individually.
Open Access Policy
Verba has open access to its full-text content.
There are no processing charges.
Information about self-archiving
Once the paper has been accepted for publication in Verba, the authors can upload the pre-print to institutional repositories, blogs, or websites such as ResearchGate or Academia. In any case, the document they upload must be the original submitted to the journal, prior to peer review and without incorporating the changes due to reviewers' comments; similarly, once the article has been published by the journal, the authors can upload the editor's version to an institutional or personal repository.
Indexed/abstracted in
This journal is included in the following catalogues and bibliographies:
LATINDEX (catálogo)
Disclaimer and exclusion of liability
is not responsible for the contents of any article, and the fact of its sponsoring the spreading of an article does not necessarily entail its agreement on the theses exposed in the article. The editor, in any case, is free of any responsibility resulting from the author’s eventual violation of intellectual property rights.
Review form
Ethical Guidelines
The publication of scientific articles involves several actors, including the publisher, the editors in chief, the reviewers and the authors. It is expected that each of these agents have an ethical behaviour referred to ethical principles partially inspired in those provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines.
Publisher:
The publisher provides technical assistance and support to the journal editors in the use of the web platform, and maintains the software updated and able to facilitate the submission, evaluation and publication process of scientific works. The publisher also collaborates with the editors in chief indexing the papers, providing information about the databases requirements and, so, contributing to the Journal positioning in the usual rankings. Broadly, the publisher should helps to increase the editorial quality of the Journal, contributing to its visibility, internationalization and impact.
Editors in chief:
Editors in chief ensures that manuscripts submitted are evaluated based exclusively on its intellectual content, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political affiliation or philosophical trend of the authors. They guarantee the confidentiality of the work, not revealing the identity of the authors to other agents except to those authorized by the publisher, the potential reviewers, the actual reviewers or the editorial board of the journal. Editors can refuse a job if it not satisfy the formal requirements or approach a subject not belonging to the scope of the journal. Editors communicate within the deadlines, once they see the referees and heard the editorial board, the acceptance or rejection of the submitted papers.
Reviewers:
Reviewers should refuse to refer a paper if they do not feel qualified in the subject approached or if they can not take the evaluation within the deadline suggested by the Journal. The referee report should be objective and written in a clearly and reasoned style. Reviewers should avoid ad hominem references and offensive or demeaning comments; their suggestions should focus mainly on the improvement work. Reviewers should treat manuscripts as confidential documents, and their contents is not used in their own works. Reviewers should reject referee papers if they show a conflict of interest, for example a past or present relationship with the paper's authors or the institutions they depend.
Authors:
Authors should submit papers containing original research on a clearly identifiable and not previously published subject. They should not send articles including a substantial part of others papers or books already published. Papers should be written so that they can be understood or replicated by reviewers. If ideas of others are used, they should be clearly referenced; plagiarism is an unacceptable behaviour and its detection involves cancel the submission or remove it from the platform if it was already published. In case of co-authorship, all people that significantly contribute to the paper are considered its author; each author should be able to identify which parts of the work are own and which parts are from others authors, and must maintain confidentiality of the all contents until the article is published. Simultaneous paper sending to other Journals is a sufficient condition for archiving it. If in the process of the paper edition the authors find errors or improprieties, they should communicate to the editors in chief as soon as possible and cooperate in their correction. Authors should communicate the potential conflict of interest between the paper findings and the financial support.
These guidelines are consistent with the ethical code of the University of Santiago de Compostela, institution to which this Journal belongs.
https://www.usc.es/gl/goberno/valedor/codigoetico/CodigoEtico.html
Digital preservation policy
This journal develops various processes in order to preserve permanent access to digital objects hosted on its own servers:
- Backups.
- Monitoring of the technological environment to foresee possible migrations of obsolete formats or software.
- Digital preservation metadata.
- Use of DOI.
The files published on this website are available in easily reproducible formats (PDF)
Anti-plagiarism Policy
This journal is a member of Similarity Check, a multi-publisher initiative started by Crossref to screen published and submitted content for originality.
Through Similarity Check, we use the iThenticate software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted or published manuscripts.
By depositing all of our content in the Similarity Check database we allow other Similarity Check members to screen their submissions against our published articles.
Interoperability protocols
Verba provides an interface OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) that allows other websites and information services to harvest the published content metadata.
Specifications:
OAI-PMH Protocol Version 2.0
Dublin Core Metadata 1.1
URL for harvesters:
Journal History
The journal Verba (Anuario Galego de Filoloxía), edited by the Publications and Scientific Exchange Service of the University of Santiago de Compostela since 1974, has published papers dealing with issues related to Galician Philology, Hispanic Philology, Portuguese Philology, Romance Philology and General Linguistics. It is published annually and includes a collection of supplementary volumes for studies longer than articles. By the end of 2011 it had published a total of thirty-eight annual volumes and sixty-seven supplementary ones, and is considered one of the journals which has to be consulted by all researchers in Romance linguistics and philology.
As indicated in the preface to the first issue, Verba was born “as a direct result of the significance that philological studies in Galicia have acquired in recent years”; and although Galician philology was not its exclusive field of study, the aim was to give priority to “the Galician language in all its manifestations”, without adhering to any particular theoretical line. This approach explained the subtitle Annual of Galician Philology. Over the course of its first seven issues, two of the founders of the Institute of the Galician Language, Constantino García and Antón Santamarina, served as Editor-in-chief and Secretary respectively. Others that merit mention here as active supporters of the journal are three researchers and teachers at the University of Santiago de Compostela: Ramón Lorenzo, Guillermo Rojo and Xosé Luís Couceiro.
Each annual volume comprises three sections, one for articles, one for notes and other brief communications on various issues, and a final section devoted to reviews of books. In accordance with its initial orientation, the early volumes contain a great deal of work on different aspects of the Galician language (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, etymology, onomastics, etc.) by recognised foreign experts ( H. Meier , J.M. Piel, H. Bursch, D. Kremer...), researchers affiliated to the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (including, in addition to the founders, Carbalho R. Calero, A. Moralejo Lasso, J.L. Rodríguez, M. Brea...) and those from other teaching and research centres (J.L. Pensado, M. Alvar, M.C. Ríos Panisse, M.C. Henríquez, J. Neira, C. Oro , E. Rivas, X.M. Lema, I. Millán, J. Schroten, D. Prieto Alonso, M. Fernández…). However, in these early volumes studies on aspects of Spanish linguistics are also found (by G. Rojo, A.M. Espinosa, E. AlarcosLlorach, M.C. Bobes Naves, F. Lázaro Mora, J. Pena, S. Gutiérrez Ordóñez, M .Taboada...), or addressing Romance topics such as Asturian (L. Rodríguez-Castellano, X. Ll. García Arias, A.M. Cano), French (M. Urdiales, C. Flores Varela, M.D. Olivares Vaquero, I. Sánchez Regueira) and Italian (I. González) and issues of General linguistics (C. Peregrín Otero, F. Marcos Marín , F. Abad Nebot, M. Fernández Pérez...).
From Volume 8 (1981), as well as the original Editor and Secretary (Constantino García and Antón Santamarina), an editorial board of three members (Ramón Lorenzo, Guillermo Rojo and Xosé LuísCouceiro) and two coordinators (Mercedes Brea and Isabel González) are also listed as responsible for the journal. With this organizational structure, which continued until Volume 13 (1986), Verba moved towards a reduction in the proportion of studies published on Galician linguistics, and at the same time, while continuing to publish work from those who had become habitual contributors, opened up to linguists from different fields, whose work would appear in the journal over the following years and decades. The first article in Volume 13, for example, was by the renowned international expert Veikko Väänänen, who wrote on "Some linguistic and stylistic features of the Itinerarium Egeriae."
From Volume 14 (1987), with Alexandre Veiga assuming the position of Secretary and Antón Santamarina replacing Xosé Luís Couceiro on the editorial board, Verba now had an academic committee composed of Romance specialists from various European universities, and this was gradually expanded over the years. In 1991 (Volume 18) Ramón Lorenzo was appointed Editor and Constantino García Honorary Editor, while the editorial committee was composed of Mercedes Brea, Antón Santamarina and Jesús Pena. Carlos Folgar, as Secretary, coordinated the publication of Volume 20 (1993) and from 1994 (Volume 21) until 2011 (Volume 38) this position has been occupied by Ramón Mariño Paz. Since 1995 the annual volumes have contained, in addition to articles, notes and book reviews, a fourth section in which publications received during that year are reported.
Between 2010 and 2011 the journal was edited by Antón Santamarina, who resigned from the position voluntarily after several months. Since May 2011 the editorial duties have been shared by Ramón Mariño Paz and María José Rodríguez Espiñeira, while the Secretary has been Mariña Arbor Aldea. Since then the journal has had an editorial board (comprising Nicole Delbecque, Fernando Sánchez-Miret, Ángela di Tullio, Xosé Afonso Álvarez Pérez, as well as the Editor and the Secretary), an advisory committee composed of specialists from various fields of research to be consulted regarding the quality of work received, and a scientific committee of recognised researchers who, where appropriate, may also be requested to give an opinion on a specific article or note that the editors submit for their consideration. In addition, since Volume 38, Constantino García, Ramón Lorenzo and Antón Santamarina have been Honorary Editors, and the journal’s honorary committee also includes various individuals who have worked for Verba over many years.
These organizational changes, substitutions of personnel, and other developments since its foundation have not led to a change in the academic development of Verba, which has become a prestigious international forum open to the discussion of the most diverse issues relating to Romance linguistics, including the linguistics of the different domains of Romance, linguistic theory, and some aspects of applied linguistics.
Regarding the collection of supplementary volumes, their thematic has gone in parallel with that of the main volumes. From a predominance of Galician topics in the volumes published until the early eighties (dialect studies on the speech of different regions of Galicia, work on phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon and toponymy; reissues such as Elements of Galician Historical Grammar by V. García de Diego), the supplements, without abandoning the academic study of Galician, were extended to include a greater presence of work focusing on different aspects of old and modern Spanish, and occasionally studies of other Romance languages.
A field of research addressed by more than a few of these papers is that of philological and linguistic studies of the Medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric.
In its early days the journal’s official language was Spanish, but in Volume 5 (1978) Galician was adopted, and its initial subtitle Anuario Gallego de Filología (Galician Philology Annual) became Anuario Galego de Filoloxía.