Yesterday (8th March) the news started circulating on social media that Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn, the editors of Wiley’s journal Syntax, were stepping down and founding a brand new, diamond Open Access journal, Syntactic Theory and Research.
Congratulations to Suzanne and Klaus for taking this step, and we look forward to including the new journal on our list! The full text of the circulated statement is below.
“We, Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn, are making public our resignation from our posts as the editors of the journal Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental, and Interdisciplinary Research. We are resigning to protest changes imposed unilaterally by the journal’s publisher. At the same time we are announcing the foundation of a new journal provisionally named Syntactic Theory and Research, to continue the tradition of Syntax.
Suzanne was a founding editor of Syntax, and Klaus has been her co-editor since 2013. Twenty-six years ago, Syntax was set up to facilitate timely and cutting edge reports and dialogue among colleagues in the field. We believe that Syntax has served this function well. Apart from its high standards of content, Syntax stands out, we believe, for its care and attention to detail in the presentation of complex linguistic data and analysis. It is with a heavy heart that we have come to the conclusion that our position as editors of the journal is no longer tenable. Some of the members of the journal’s editorial board have joined us in resigning. In this letter, we explain our reasoning and what we see as the way forward.
We believe that there are three key ways in which a good journal adds value to scientific communication:
Peer review ideally ensures the reliable and consistent selection of the highest-quality papers and at the same time brings about an improvement in each paper considered.
Copyediting ensures that complex scientific ideas are communicated clearly to the widest possible audience, including when authors are nonnative users of academic English, and that the field’s standards for written work (consistent glossing and translation of examples, the Unified Style Sheet, etc.) are adhered to and exemplified.
Professional publication ensures that material is permanently accessible, indexed, searchable by search engines, and marketed to a wide target audience.
The content of articles is provided by authors free of charge to the publisher. Working members of the field carry out peer assessment of papers free of charge to the publisher. Editors organize this process and make decisions, free of charge or with nominal compensation.
It seems only fair that the academic community expects a high standard of service in the areas traditionally covered by the publisher, which we summarized above as copyediting and professional publication.
Alas, the publisher of Syntax, Wiley Blackwell, put financial pressure on the journal’s independent editorial office (staffed at roughly 0.4 of a full-time position). Starving the editorial office of appropriate funding led to a backlog of accepted but unpublished papers—a very unfortunate development given that Syntax was founded with the aim of providing speedy turnaround, in the interest of authors and the field. The backlog and the cost of the editorial office were then used by Wiley Blackwell as reasons to both eliminate the role of the editorial office’s managing editor and assign all production tasks, including copyediting, to its generic production team. This team has no specialist knowledge of linguistics and is not up to meeting the particular challenges of dealing reliably with foreign-language character sets, glosses and gloss alignment, tree diagrams, and standardized syntactic formalism.
As journal editors, we have a number of roles. One of them is to represent the field in its relationship with the journal’s publisher. We feel that the changes unilaterally imposed by Wiley Blackwell represent a fundamental and detrimental shift in the implicit contract between publisher and scientific community. The new terms, we feel, no longer meet the needs of our community. This has led to our decision to resign effective March 31, 2024.
We are now planning to start a new journal to take the mantle of Syntax. The new journal will be “diamond open access”: that is, no fees will be required to publish a paper in the journal nor to access the content. The diamond-open-access model of publishing seems to us to be not only an ethical imperative but also scientifically mandated: we cannot expect the great syntactic riches of understudied languages to be brought to bear on syntactic theory unless native speaker linguists of those languages, who may have few financial and institutional resources to rely on, have access to cutting edge research and can communicate their own findings to their colleagues around the world without having to pay publication fees.
We have settled on Syntactic Theory and Research as a working title for the new journal. The professional-publication function will be carried out by the Open Library of Humanities, which already publishes Glossa, Laboratory Phonology, and the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. We are hoping that the community of syntacticians will provide the content as well as peer review. We will also be calling on the community to support the editorial office of the new journal. We have reached medium-term preliminary funding agreements with the Van Riemsdijk Foundation, GLOW, and the LAGB, but we will need further support from the community, from linguistics departments, and from university libraries to make the journal viable in the longer term.
The new journal will not be owned by a publishing house but by the field in perpetuity. To make sure the new journal meets the scientific community’s needs, we will reach out to discuss its exact name, scope, and description once we have been released from our contractual duties with Wiley Blackwell.
With collegial regards
Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn”
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