Launch date: 8th September 2026

UCL Press is pleased to announce the launch of the Journal of Experimental Pragmatics (JXPrag), the first journal dedicated exclusively to the field of experimental pragmatics. As a Diamond Open Access publication featuring an innovative community-led review model, the journal provides a dedicated home for a mature and rapidly growing interdisciplinary field while exploring new approaches to open scholarly communication.

Experimental pragmatics investigates how people understand and use meaning in communication through rigorous empirical research. Drawing on linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and cognitive science, the field has developed into a vibrant international research community with its own conferences, research networks and shared methodological approaches. Yet despite its growth and influence, research in experimental pragmatics has typically been dispersed across journals in multiple disciplines.

JXPrag provides the first dedicated venue for this community, bringing together research that combines theoretical insight with rigorous experimentation and creating a focal point for new discoveries, methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Published by UCL Press as a Diamond Open Access journal, JXPrag is free to read and publish in. All content is published under a CC BY licence, ensuring that research can be accessed, reused and built upon without financial or legal barriers.

The journal introduces a novel Voluntary Action Editor (VAE) model that places active researchers at the centre of the editorial process. Once a submission has been assessed by the Editors-in-Chief and deemed suitable for the journal, it is posted online as a citable open access preprint and made available to the community of VAE: at this point, a VAE (a researcher with relevant experience) opts-in to act as handling editor for the submission, while working in consultation with an Editorial Board member who acts to provide support, oversight, guidance and quality assurance throughout the review process. Reviewer reports, author responses and editorial decisions are published alongside the preprint, creating a transparent and evolving scholarly record from submission through to publication.

Building on the open publishing model already pioneered by UCL Press’s journal UCL Open Environment, JXPrag forms part of a broader effort to explore how scholarly publishing can better recognise the full range of contributions that support research. While traditional publishing often focuses almost exclusively on the final article, JXPrag brings together preprints, peer review reports, editorial decisions and manuscript revisions into a connected and transparent research record, making visible the intellectual contributions of reviewers, editors and research communities.

Through Diamond Open Access, community-led editorial participation and openly available publishing infrastructure, including all the platform code being shared freely on GitHub, the journal extends the principles of open science beyond access to research outputs and into the processes and systems that shape scholarly communication.

The launch of JXPrag reflects UCL Press's wider commitment to developing publishing models that are more transparent, inclusive and community owned. By broadening opportunities for researchers to participate in editorial decision-making and by openly documenting the development of research from preprint to publication, the journal aims to strengthen participation in open science while creating a richer and more connected research ecosystem.

"Experimental pragmatics has developed into a thriving international field with its own questions, methods and research community. JXPrag provides a dedicated home for this work while reflecting the values that define the field: rigorous research, collaboration, transparency and openness. We are particularly excited by the opportunity to involve the community more directly in the editorial process and to make peer review a visible and constructive part of the research dialogue."

Ira Noveck, Nicole Gotzner and Richard Breheny, Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Pragmatics.

"At UCL Press, we are interested not only in making research openly available, but also in exploring how publishing itself can become more open, inclusive and connected. Building on the foundations established by UCL Open Environment, JXPrag further builds and demonstrates how publishing can better recognise contributions beyond the article, broaden participation in open science and create a more transparent and connected research record. By making both publishing processes and infrastructure openly available, we hope to support wider innovation across scholarly communication."

Ian Caswell, Journals Manager, UCL Press.

The Journal of Experimental Pragmatics is open for submissions from the 8th September 2026.

For more information, visit: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/jxprag.

About the Journal of Experimental Pragmatics

The Journal of Experimental Pragmatics is a community-owned Diamond Open Access journal dedicated to experimental research on speaker meaning and communication. Its distinctive mission is to provide a venue for studies that experimentally investigate (primarily verbal) phenomena while also engaging carefully with theoretically driven approaches. The journal encourages cutting-edge contributions from the fields of pragmatics and semantics, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as interdisciplinary work that integrates two or more of these areas while delivering robust, replicable results. Submissions that combine experimental human data with computational modelling are likewise encouraged. This journal will appeal to anyone interested in language, communication, cognition and neuroscience.

About UCL Press

UCL Press is the UK's first fully open access university press. Through innovative publishing models, open-source infrastructure and community-led approaches, UCL Press works to make research more accessible, transparent and impactful for researchers and society worldwide.

Find out more about UCL Press journals, here: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk

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