open access

Editors of Syntax resign, found new journal

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”

List of platinum Open Access linguistics journals

This list aims to include all peer-reviewed platinum Open Access journals in general, descriptive, and theoretical linguistics, as long as they are open to submissions from anyone. Due to the fast-moving nature of the field it is likely to be constantly out of date. If you find that your favourite platinum journal is missing, that a link is broken, or that a detail is wrong, let us know on Twitter or by emailing George. The list was last updated in August 2022.

The list is built on the excellent work of Humans Who Read Grammars. It is in alphabetical order.

General linguistics journals

Language-specific or area-specific linguistics journals

Journals not accepting submissions

Full details

Acta Linguistica Asiatica

a journal devoted to the study of Asian languages, their translation and teaching.

  • Languages covered: languages of Asia.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Afrikanistik Aegyptologie Online (AAeA)

Journal in African Studies and Egyptology from University of Cologne. Multilingual, abstracts are welcome in German, English, French, Arabic and larger African languages. Full articles only in German, English or French though.

  • Languages covered: African languages, Egyptology.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Anglophonia

French Journal of English Linguistics. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: English.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Argumentation et analyse du discours

A journal of language sciences which aims to analyse the connexions between discourse analysis, rhetoric and argumentation. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: discourse analysis.

Argumentation et analyse du discours

A journal of language sciences which aims to analyse the connexions between discourse analysis, rhetoric and argumentation. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: discourse analysis.

Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics (AWPAL)

“a peer-reviewed, open-access, online-only international academic journal whose goal is to provide a forum for discussions about applied and theoretical issues in African linguistics. AWPAL welcomes original contributions on all aspects of African languages and linguistics, in particular those that are data-oriented and descriptive or pedagogical in nature. Nonetheless, manuscripts are accepted across all domains of linguistics.”

  • Languages covered: languages of Africa.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Bhasha: Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions

“an international journal that welcomes submissions that adopt evidence-based approaches to all areas of linguistics related to South Asian literary (classical and modern/contemporary), spoken and/or endangered languages.”

  • Languages covered: languages of South Asia.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Biolinguistics

“BIOLINGUISTICS is a peer-reviewed journal exploring theoretical linguistics that takes the biological foundations of human language seriously. The Advisory Board and the Editorial Board are made up of leading scholars from all continents in the fields of theoretical linguistics, language acquisition, language change, theoretical biology, genetics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology.”

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: biolinguistics.

Cadernos de Etnolingüística

Journal for indigenous South American languages.

  • Languages covered: South American languages.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Cahiers

Web-based journal of the Association for French Language Studies.

  • Languages covered: French.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Cahiers de praxématique

French-language journal devoted to the study of the production and the circulation of meaning. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: pragmatics, discourse analysis, semantics.

Catalan Journal of Linguistics

General linguistics journal supported by the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica of the UAB and the Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

CogniTextes

Journal of the French association for cognitive linguistics. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: cognitive linguistics.

Computational Linguistics

The longest-running publication devoted exclusively to the computational and mathematical properties of language and the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. Published by MIT Press.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: computational linguistics.

Constructions+

A multimedia platform for linguistic research concerned with the structure, use, function, and development of ‘constructions’ in language and linguistics. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all, especially construction grammar.

Corela: cognition, représentation, langage

Journal of language science. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Corpus

A journal promoting research in corpus linguistics at various levels, theoretical, methodological and epistemological. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: corpus linguistics.

Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD Journal)

Publishes research which highlights, develops or challenges frameworks for understanding the role that structures of discourse play in constructing and sustaining social situations, identities and relations.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: discourse analysis.

Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México

Covers all research that advances our understanding of natural languages. Submissions in Spanish or English.

  • Languages covered: all (submissions on under-represented languages encouraged).
  • Subfields covered: all.

Dialogue & Discourse

Deals with language “beyond the single sentence”, adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: pragmatics, discourse analysis and related fields.

Études finno-ougriennes

Études finno-ougriennes is the only academic journal in French in the field of Finno-Ugric studies. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: Finno-Ugric, Uralic.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics

Journal for all aspects of Finno-Ugric and Uralic languages. Continued as the Journal of Uralic Linguistics (not platinum OA) since 2022.

  • Languages covered: Finno-Ugric, Uralic.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Glossa

Full financial support for this journal is provided by LingOA with long-term funding provided by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Sprung out of a disagreement between the linguists of Lingua and their publisher.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Glossa Psycholinguistics

Glossa Psycholinguistics “publishes contributions to the field of psycholinguistics in the broad sense. These should combine empirical and theoretical perspectives, and illuminate our understanding of the nature of language. Submissions from all fields and theoretical perspectives on any psycholinguistic topic are appropriate, as are submissions focusing on any level of linguistic analysis … or population … Methods and approaches include e.g. experimentation, computational modeling, corpus analyses, and cognitive neuroscience. Contributions should be of interest to psycholinguists and other scholars interested in language.”

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: psycholinguistics.

ICAME Journal

An annual publication containing articles and reviews on research carried out related to English-language corpora. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: English.
  • Subfields covered: corpus linguistics.

Indo-European Linguistics (IEL)

IEL is devoted to the study of the ancient and medieval Indo-European languages from the perspective of modern theoretical linguistics.

  • Languages covered: pre-modern Indo-European.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Internationale Neerlandistiek

Journal of the Internationale Vereniging voor Neerlandistiek.

  • Languages covered: Dutch, Afrikaans.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Isogloss

A journal on variation of Romance and Iberian languages.

  • Languages covered: Romance, Iberian.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Italian Journal of Linguistics (IJL)

IJL “seeks to bridge the gap between descriptive and theoretical research, welcoming work which makes complex language data accessible to those unfamiliar with the language or language area under study, as well as work which makes complex theoretical positions more accessible to those working outside that theoretical framework.”

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Jazykovedný casopis

The Journal of Ludovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics, SAV, Slovakia. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne

International journal from 1886 from the Finno-Ugrian Society.

  • Languages covered: Finno-Ugric languages.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Journal for Media Linguistics (Journal für Medienlinguistik)

Open access journal in the area of language, communication, and media(lity). Publishes articles in English and German.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields: media linguistics.

Journal of Experimental Phonetics (Estudios de Fonética Experimental)

Publishes original research articles related to any branch of experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology. Also publishes theoretical phonetics and book reviews.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: phonetics, laboratory phonology.

Journal of Historical Syntax

Journal focusing on historical and diachronic studies of syntax. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: historical linguistics, syntax.

Journal of Language Modelling

Aims to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and natural language processing.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: computational linguistics, natural language processing, and adjacent areas of theoretical linguistics.

Journal of Portuguese and Spanish Lexically-based Creoles (Revista de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola – RCBLPE)

Journal of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish-Lexified Creoles.

  • Languages covered: Iberian Romance-based pidgin and creole languages, and language contacts involving Portuguese or Spanish.
  • Subfields covered: contact linguistics.

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

The Journal of Portuguese Linguistics is concerned with all branches of linguistics and aims at publishing high-quality papers in the field of Portuguese linguistics, including the comparison between any varieties of Portuguese and any other language(s). Part of LingOA.

  • Languages covered: Portuguese.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Journal of South Asian Linguistics

JSAL is devoted to the linguistic study of South Asia.

  • Languages covered: languages of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and their diasporas.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Laboratory Phonology

Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. Part of LingOA.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: phonetics, phonology.

Language Documentation & Conservation

Journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published exclusively in electronic form by the University of Hawaiʻi Press.

  • Languages covered: all, especially endangered languages.
  • Subfields covered: language documentation, language policy, language planning, language revitalization, lexicography.

Language Documentation & Description

Journal from Endangered Languages Publishing.

  • Languages covered: all, especially endangered languages.
  • Subfields covered: language documentation, language description, sociolinguistics, language policy, language revitalization.

Language and Linguistics in Melanesia

Previously known as Kivung. The journal of the Linguistics Society of Papua New Guinea.

  • Languages covered: languages of Papua New Guinea and Melanesia, including creoles.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Languages of the Caucasus

Publishes linguistic research on languages of the Caucasus

  • Languages covered: languages of the Caucasus.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Lengas: revue de sociolinguistique

French-language sociolinguistics journal. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: Occitan.
  • Subfields covered: sociolinguistics, language policy.

Lingua Posnaniensis

The Journal of Poznan Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences and Adam Mickiewicz University, Institute of Linguistics.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Linguistic Discovery

Journal supported by Dartmouth College.

  • Languages covered: all, especially endangered languages.
  • Subfields covered: descriptive linguistics.

Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT)

LiLT focuses on relationships between linguistic insights, which can prove valuable to language technology, and language technology, which can enrich linguistic research. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related theoretical subfields.

Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads

“The journal aims to host research within the field of linguistic typology. It is meant to give space above all, but not exclusively, to studies exploring the crossroads at which linguistic typology meets its closest neighbors. The journal will therefore welcome works dealing especially with the intersections between typology and other areas of linguistics, such as diachrony, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus-based analysis of speech and discourse.”

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: typology and neighbouring disciplines.

Linguistica Uralica

Journal from the Estonian Academy of Sciences (Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia).

  • Languages covered: Uralic (Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic) languages.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Linguistik Online

A well-established online-only generalist journal.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Modèles linguistiques

French-language general linguistics journal. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Nordic Journal of African Studies

Journal in African studies from Nordic Association of African Studies. Articles welcome in English, French and Swahili.

  • Languages covered: African languages.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Nordlyd

Published by the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and primarily features articles with some connection to UiT. Contributions are, however, welcome from others.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Orientalia Suecana

Published by the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. Adopts an open peer review model according to which the identity of the author(s) and the reviewers are known by all participants.

  • Languages covered: Semitic, Iranian, Turkic, Indic, Chinese.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Papers in Historical Phonology

Published by the University of Edinburgh. Employs post-publication peer review.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: historical linguistics, phonology.

Philologie im Netz

Interdisciplinary journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Prague Journal of English Studies

English literature and linguistics journal of the Charles University, Prague. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: English.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Radical: A Journal of Phonology

Phonology journal which “aims to promote studies with provocative, innovative and possibly non-conformist analyses”.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: phonology.

Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes

General linguistics journal. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Rivista di Grammatica Generativa (Research in Generative Grammar)

An Italy-based journal of generative linguistics.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Research in Language

General linguistics journal with an interdisciplinary focus. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Russian Journal of Linguistics

(Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov) “The journal covers functional and socio-cognitive aspects of different languages and publishes a wide range of interdisciplinary studies that focus on the effect of sociocultural contexts on language development and use. This special approach allows the editors to publish research from a broad range of different linguistics subfields such as language and culture, comparative linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, intercultural communication, theory and practice of translation.”

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all (see above).

Semantic Fieldwork Methods

dedicated to the discussion of innovative techniques and materials for use in semantic and pragmatic fieldwork.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: semantics, pragmatics.

Semantics & Pragmatics

Prolific and successful journal supported by the Linguistic Society of America. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: semantics, pragmatics.

SKY Journal of Linguistics

Journal from the linguistic association of Finland. Articles welcome in English, French and German.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Snippets

Tiny little articles. Published by LED Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

An international review of English studies, run from Adam Mickiewicz University.

  • Languages covered: English.
  • Subfields covered: all, particularly historical.

Studia Orientalia Electronica (StOrE)

An offshoot of Studia Orientalia published by the Finnish Oriental Society. Accepts original research articles and reviews in all fields of Asian and African studies.

  • Languages covered: languages of Asia and Africa.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Studies in African Linguistics

SAL’s goal is to provide a public forum within the community of African language scholars for discourse on issues of direct concern to the field of African linguistics. Formerly part of eLanguage.

  • Languages covered: African languages.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Syntaktika

French-language journal. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: Ancient Greek.
  • Subfields covered: syntax, semantics.

Taal en Tongval

Language variation in the Netherlands, Flanders and related languages/areas.

  • Languages covered: Dutch, Frisian, (Low) German, languages spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Taiwan Journal of Linguistics

Based at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Chengchi University. The language of publication is English.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Te Reo: Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand

Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand. Accepts submissions from scholars all over the world and in any subfield.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Topics in Linguistics

Run by the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

An ACL-sponsored journal that publishes papers in all areas of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: computational linguistics.

Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage

French-language journal. Part of OpenEdition.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Werkwinkel: Journal of Low Countries and South African Studies

Journal of of Adam Mickiewicz University. Part of De Gruyter Open.

  • Languages covered: Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft

The journal of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). Covers all aspects of linguistics.

  • Languages covered: all.
  • Subfields covered: all.

Brill partners with ScienceOpen

Brill Publishers are not just a long-established linguistics publisher – they’ve also demonstrated in recent years that they’re ahead of the game, by spearheading the charge towards Open Access in journal publishing. Brill has now partnered with rapidly-growing new kid on the block ScienceOpen to share content from three of its journals: the no-fees Gold OA journal Indo-European Linguistics, the Gold OA Journal of Greek Linguistics, and the sporadically OA Language Dynamics and Change.

I’ve added content from these three journals to my collection on Language Change at ScienceOpen. See my editorial for more details!

Open Handbooks in Linguistics

One to watch is the new initiative Open Handbooks in Linguistics. From their blurb: “We consider the open access publishing model to be especially important for handbooks for the following reasons:

  • Handbooks can represent a significant benefit to scholars around the world with limited or no access to commercial publishers’ book products, since they summarize current research in a compact and organized fashion.
  • Commercial publishers in our field are producing many more handbooks than in the past, since they represent a significant profit opportunity. Many linguist-hours are being poured into these volumes, but their focus and direction is being at least partly driven by publishers’ goals, rather than by the field’s needs.
  • Open exchange of ideas is essential to the advancement of science, and open access to our research products is therefore a key priority for our field, as for all scientific work.”

Three hundred years of piracy: why academic books should be free

I think academic books should be free.

It’s not a radically new proposal, but I’d like to clarify what I mean by “free”. First, there’s the financial sense: books should be free in that there should be no cost to either the author or the reader. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, books should be free in terms of what the reader can do with them: copying, sharing, creating derivative works, and more.

I’m not going to go down the murky road of what exactly a modern academic book actually is. I’m just going to take it for granted that there is such a thing, and that it will continue to have a niche in the scholarly ecosystem of the future, even if it doesn’t have the pre-eminent role it has at present in some disciplines, or even the same form and structure. (For instance, I’d be pretty keen to see an academic monograph written in Choose Your Own Adventure style.)

Another thing I’ll be assuming is that technology does change things, even if we’re rather it didn’t. If you’re reluctant to accept that, I’d like to point you to what happened with yellow pages. Or take a look at the University of Manchester’s premier catering space, Christie’s Bistro. Formerly a science library, this imposing chamber retains its bookshelves, which are all packed full of books that have no conceivable use to man or beast: multi-volume indexes of mid-20th-century scientific periodicals, for instance. In this day and age, print is still very much alive, but at the same time the effects of technological change aren’t hard to spot.

With those assumptions in place, then, let’s move on to thinking about the academic book of the future. To do that I’m going to start with the academic book of the past, so let’s rewind time by three centuries. In 1710, the world’s first copyright law, the UK’s Statute of Anne, was passed. This law was a direct consequence of the introduction and spread of the printing press, and the businesses that had sprung up around it. Publishers such as the rapacious Andrew Millar had taken to seizing on texts that, even now, could hardly be argued to be anything other than public-domain: for instance, Livy’s History of Rome. (Titus Livius died in AD 17.) What’s more, they then claimed an exclusive right to publish such texts – a right that extended into perpetuity. This perpetual version of copyright was based on the philosopher John Locke’s theory of property as a natural right. Locke himself was fiercely opposed to this interpretation of his work, but that didn’t dissuade the publishers, who saw the opportunity to make a quick buck (as well as a slow one).

Fortunately, the idea of perpetual copyright was defeated in the courts in 1774, in the landmark Donaldson v. Becket case. It’s reared its ugly head since, of course, for instance when the US was preparing its 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act: it was mentioned that the musician Sonny Bono believed that copyright should last forever (see also this execrable New York Times op-ed). What’s interesting is that this proposal was challenged at the time, by Edinburgh-based publisher Alexander Donaldson – and, for his efforts to make knowledge more widely available, Donaldson was labelled a “pirate”. The term has survived, and is now used – for instance – to describe those scientists who try to access paywalled research articles using the hashtag #ICanHazPDF, and those scientists who help them. What these people have in common with the cannon-firing, hook-toting, parrot-bearing sailors of the seven seas is not particularly clear, but it’s clearly high time that the term was reclaimed.

If you’re interested in the 18th century and its copyright trials and tribulations, I’d encourage you to take a look at Yamada Shōji’s excellent 2012 book “Pirate” Publishing: the Battle over Perpetual Copyright in eighteenth-century Britain, which, appropriately, is available online under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. And lest you think that this is a Whiggish interpretation of history, let me point out that contemporaries saw things in exactly the same way. The political economist Adam Smith, in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that, before the invention of printing, the goal of an academic writer was simply “communicating to other people the curious and useful knowledge which he had acquired himself“. Printing changed things.

Let’s come back to the present. In the present, academic authors make almost nothing from their work: royalties from monographs are a pittance. Meanwhile, it’s an economic truism that each electronic copy made of a work – at a cost of essentially nothing – increases total societal wealth. (This is one of the reasons that intellectual property is not real property.) What academic authors want is readership and recognition: they aren’t after the money, and don’t, for the most part, care about sales. The bizarre part is that they’re punished for trying to increase wealth and readership by the very organizations that supposedly exist to help them increase wealth and readership. Elsevier, for instance, filed a complaint earlier this year against the knowledge sharing site Sci-Hub.org, demanding compensation. It beggars belief that they have the audacity to do this, especially given their insane 37% profit margin in 2014.

So we can see that publishers, when profit-motivated, have interests that run counter to those of academics themselves. And, when we look at the actions of eighteenth-century publishers such as Millar, we can see that this is nothing new. Where does this leave us for the future? Here’s a brief sketch:

  • Publishers should be mission-oriented, and that mission should be the transmission of knowledge.
  • Funding should come neither from authors nor from readers. There are a great many business models compatible with this.
  • Copyright should remain with the author: it’s the only way of preventing exploitation. In practice, this means a CC-BY license, or something like it. Certain humanities academics claim that CC-BY licenses allow plagiarism. This is nonsense.

How far are we down this road? Not far enough; but if you’re a linguist, take a look at Language Science Press, if you haven’t already.

In conclusion, then, for-profit publishers should be afraid. If they can’t do their job, then academics will. Libraries will. Mission-oriented publishers will. Pirates will.

It’s sometimes said that “information wants to be free”. This is false: information doesn’t have agency. But if we want information to be free, and take steps in that direction… well, it’s a start.

Note: this post is a written-up version of a talk I gave on 11th Nov 2015 at the John Rylands Library, as part of a debate on “Opening the Book: the Future of the Academic Monograph”. Thanks to the audience, organizers and other panel members for their feedback.

Kai von Fintel’s Lingua roundup

If you’re a linguist, then unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks you’ll have heard about the Lingua team’s bid for freedom in the form of Glossa. There’s a great roundup of all of the relevant steps and news coverage over on Kai von Fintel’s blog.

You can find Glossa on Facebook here, and on Twitter here.

Lingua to move to Open Access

On 11th October 2015, Lingua editor Johan Rooryck posted the following on his Facebook wall:

Last week, the editors of Lingua wrote a letter to Elsevier in order to renegotiate our collaboration. We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.

Such a move is now a real possibility thanks to a new organization called Linguistics in Open Access (Ling-OA) (http://www.lingoa.eu, website live tomorrow), Facebook: Linguistics in Open Access). Ling-OA is a non-profit foundation representing linguistics journals who wish to publish under the conditions of Fair Open Access. The journals LabPhon and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics have already decided to join this foundation.

Ling-OA has obtained financial guarantees to cover APCs for the first 5 years, provided by the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). It enjoys further support from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The impact of the journals in transition will be monitored by CWTS Leiden (http://www.cwts.nl).

The journals will be published by Ubiquity Press with the Open Library of Humanities as a long-term sustainability partner. OLH, whose platform is also provided by Ubiquity Press, will guarantee the continued publication of the journals associated with LingOA after the first five years through its consortial library funding model. OLH is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing Open Access scholarship with no author-facing APCs (https://www.openlibhums.org). This will provide long-term sustainability for Fair Open Access journals, ensuring that no researcher will ever have to pay for APCs out of their own pocket.

You can find the LingOA website here. It includes a petition to sign.

Dutch universities boycott Elsevier

‘Science is not a goal in itself. Just as art is only art once it is seen, knowledge only becomes knowledge once it is shared.’

So said the Dutch State Secretary for Education, Sander Dekker, in 2014. Now the Dutch universities are putting their money where their mouth is by boycotting Elsevier, the publisher best known for dubious business practices and extortionate fees.

The Dutch universities have a strong preference for Gold OA and have been unable to reach agreement with Elsevier in negotiations, so are taking action. From the University of Tilburg’s website:

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. According to the VSNU in daily NRC, the reactions varied from very willing to consider this to some reluctance.

A variety of linguistics journals are published with Elsevier, including the prestigious Lingua. It will be interesting to see how linguists respond to this call.

You can read more on the potential significance of this boycott at Cambridge’s Unlocking Research blog.

TROLLing: new open data archive

Linguists at the University of Tromsø have released a new repository for language and linguistic data, which is fully open access.

From the archive’s About page:

The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) is designed as an archive of linguistic data and statistical code. The archive is open access, which means that all information is available to to everyone. All postings are accompanied by searchable metadata that identify the researchers, the languages and linguistic phenomena involved, the statistical methods applied, and scholarly publications based on the data (where relevant).

Linguists worldwide are invited to post datasets and statistical models used in linguistic research. The TROLLing Steering Committee is responsible for the scientific content of the archive, whereas the University Library provides quality and relevance control, in addition to user management. The University Library also oversees the technical and legal structure of TROLLing.

You can visit the archive here. There’s also an amusing promotional video:

What happened to eLanguage? 18 months on

eLanguage was a beautiful idea. Founded by Dieter Stein and Stephen Anderson, it was an online platform for linguistics e-journals. The cost of hosting and technical support was borne by the LSA, while other things – such as typesetting, proofing, copy-editing and marketing – had to be paid for by the editors or their institutions. From 2011-2013 I was one of those editors, and, since I didn’t have a budget of my own to play with, everything was done on the cheap: I did the copy-editing and marketing (insofar as there was any) myself, and my estimable colleague Moreno Mitrović looked after the typesetting.

For whatever reasons, the LSA decided to discontinue eLanguage – presumably as part of their negotiation to bring Language itself closer to full no-fees OA status. I wasn’t happy with the decision, and neither were many others, but by the time I’d heard about it the decision had already been made. Though you can still find the archives on their website, none of the journals have been accepting new content in this form since the end of 2013. I thought I’d take a quick look at what happened to the “co-journals”, as they were called. These fall into three main categories: some ceased to exist, some were absorbed into Language, and others have struck out on their own.

Ceased to exist

In this category we have:

The former doesn’t really count, since it is the precursor of Pragmatics, and ceased to exist as such long before eLanguage came into being. Its purpose on the site was only ever as an archive. Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics, on the other hand, was never very active: it only published two articles and one review, between 2008 and 2010. Its demise is thus perhaps unsurprising.

Became part of Language

This category covers:

My own Journal of Historical Syntax published three full papers and three reviews before it merged into Language, not bad considering that it was only set up in mid-2011. After some negotiation, it became an online-only section of Language. The deal is rather similar to eLanguage, with a few crucial differences:

  • We’re paginated as part of Language, and count as such for the purposes of impact factors, etc.
  • We now have the administrative support of the Language team, who deal with the papers once they have been accepted. (This saves me and Moreno a LOT of work.)
  • The copyright agreement is no longer in the CC-BY family, though authors still retain copyright of their work, unlike with most journals.
  • It no longer carries reviews.
  • The Journal of part had to be excised from its name, due to its new non-independence.
  • Most importantly, the materials are now not instantaneously open access. Authors can pay $400 (a lot of money, but chicken feed compared to what the for-profit publishers charge) for instant Gold; otherwise, all content is made available through the LSA website after one year. Since the half-life of a linguistics article is presumably much longer than this, it’s hardly a problem to wait that long. In the meantime, it’s behind a paywall at Project Muse.

To date, three full papers have been published in the Historical Syntax section of Language, with several more on the way.

Teaching Linguistics has followed a similar path; they were established even later and hadn’t published anything as part of eLanguage. Now they have four papers out, two in 2013 and two in 2014.

Historical Syntax and Teaching Linguistics are joined by Language and Public Policy, Phonological Analysis, and Perspectives. These have generated three, one, and two papers respectively (not counting the responses and “Short Shots” that Perspectives has also generated). So all the new sections are healthy, though none incredibly prolific.

Struck out on their own

The journals which took their own path are:

The only one of the batch to move to a commercial publisher is Pragmatics, which is now at John Benjamins and has a similar setup in terms of OA to Language and its sections, including a one-year embargo. Unlike many of the other eLanguage co-journals, Pragmatics was big and established before moving to eLanguage; you can view its extensive archives here.

It’s not immediately clear what’s happened to Studies in African Linguistics. Like Pragmatics, it’s a long-established journal that much predates eLanguage. The archive page proclaims in CAPITAL LETTERS that it is NO LONGER PUBLISHING NEW CONTENT (you can view the old stuff here). However, a quick search reveals that it appears to be alive and well. It’s still fully no-fees gold OA online, which seems to be funded through print subscriptions.

Semantics and Pragmatics is the golden boy of eLanguage, its biggest success story. It has simply continued in its original form: no fees to publish or to read. The LSA still support it, though they also receive funding from MIT and the University of Texas at Austin.

Since they have technology on their side, LiLT have done well for themselves, and like Semantics and Pragmatics have hung on to gold no-fees OA. They’re now simply hosted on a server at Stanford and supported by CSLI. Their back catalogue is here.

Dialogue and Discourse ticks along quietly. They don’t publish much outside their special issues (typically only one article a year), and are hosted at Bielefeld, with no-fees gold OA. They’ve kept their identity and migrated all their back issues to the new site, which is nice.

Constructions appear to have a similar arrangement, hosted using blog software at Osnabrück. Their back issues are here. Sometimes they have a lot of content; at other times, not so much. After producing no articles in 2013, they came back in 2014 with a special issue.

(It’s important to emphasize that by highlighting the sporadic nature of these e-journals I’m not making a criticism. The principle of uniformly-sized little issues was really rather specific to print, an artefact of the Gutenberg parenthesis. It’s neither necessarily healthy nor particularly important for a journal to have a consistent volume of content. If there are ten good 100-page articles one year and only a squib the next, then so be it. Quality over quantity.)

So there’s a diversity of outcomes. Of those journals that survived, the LSA has hung onto relatively few; most are still immediate gold OA, and all are gold after no more than a year. Though the LSA’s decision to drop eLanguage was regrettable, the programme as a whole has made a significant and lasting impact on the linguistics publishing landscape.