PHILOLOGICA.NET is an international web journal based in the Czech Republic publishing scientific articles in five main areas related to the study of language (in alphabetical order):

• Culture Studies,
• Language Teaching,
• Linguistics,
• Literature, and
• Translation Studies.

The journal publishes also multidisciplinary contributions, which are usually presented in the General Topics section.

The idea to publish an electronic-only journal on topics emerging from the vast territory of modern philology was brought to life in the very early stages of establishing a not-for-profit organization The Vilém Mathesius Society in February/March 2003. The founding members of the The Vilém Mathesius Society felt an urgent need to provide the academic community with a flexible and dynamic online publishing platform which would go beyond the limitations of the traditional models of disseminating the results of scientific research.

The project of the journal was originally conceived as a grant proposal submitted to the CESNET Development Fund in 2002, but owing to the negative evaluations it received from the reviewers, it was quickly revived by the founding members of The Vilém Mathesius Society and in not more than a year, which was approximately the length of after-work and unpaid time spent on coding the journal's content management system (CMS), the journal was officially rolled out on 13 January 2004.

It should be pointed out that the idea of establishing both The Vilém Mathesius Society and the journal philologica.net was inspired by the success of the Prague Linguistic Circle and its widely recognized journal Slovo a slovesnost. The suggested connection to the Prague Linguistic Circle is by no means only a virtual one. In the process of establishing The Vilém Mathesius Society and the electronic journal we were lucky to receive profound encouragement from Professor Dr. Aleš Svoboda, a prominent Czech anglicist and visionary syntactician, and, what is more important in the present context, a member in the following teacher-student line of renowned Czech Anglicists: Vilém Mathesius - Josef Vachek - Jan Firbas - Aleš Svoboda. It is largely thanks to Professor Svoboda's support that we can now connect to and develop the tradition of the Prague School via a web journal of a professional society based on theses similar to those of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

From its very beginnings, philologica.net was created on a model which today may be identified as OpenAccess, accepting contributions to the journal mainly from the academic community and providing the community with free-of-charge and otherwise unrestricted access to the content of the journal. The majority of the articles published by philologica.net come from university professors, researchers, and PhD students, who are the target audience of the journal. We also welcome contributions from other professionals such as language teachers and professional translators.

We have introduced functional editorial policies and publishing guidelines to facilitate the process of preparing an article for philologica.net. We are a web journal and we strongly support the following view presented by Robert de Beaugrande in his article Peer Review Is Far from Peerless:

An author who posts substandard work on a website risks being cut off from the discourse community, whereas one who gets a substandard work into a journal may still command a readership elsewhere. So the sense of responsibility to do your best work should in fact be intensified, the more so when we cannot count on editorial feedback to point out our own lapses.

The Vilém Mathesius Society as the publisher of philologica.net are convinced that it may prove instrumental in fostering scientific and professional discussion in the areas of language and literary scholarship, language teaching, and language communication in general to provide anyone with a deep interest in any of these areas with a modern OpenAccess online journal of broadly defined philology.