Reviews That ARE

[Suzanne Kemmer]

There's still a role for the "good old book review". Its place is  
online, as Martin
said, but it doesn't have to be connected to any journal. It's easier  
for
a scientific association to run a website than a whole journal, even  
an online journal, so any
association in Linguistics can easily have an active website with  
news, events, and reviews
to keep its members abreast of the latest publications. (Early  
linguistics associations
published bulletins which served the same function.)

The International Cognitive Linguistics Association has such a  
website and
in the last year the review part of the site has developed quite well
under Martin Hilpert's web editorship:

http://www.cogling.org/bookreviews.shtml

There are about 30 reviews that have been posted since the
review part of the ICLA website started up last year, 25 more titles  
are under review,
and many more are awaiting reviewers to offer to review them.

I read reviews online on the Linguist, but the site's too broad
to cover any specific area well.

I recommend the ICLA's review site as a model for those who want to  
get their
specialized association to serve them in a similar way. An  
association is as
active as its members.

Suzanne Kemmer
confessedly, the ICLA webmaster











On Oct 23, 2007, at 9:57 AM, Martin Haspelmath wrote:

> I think it would be good if we as a field realized -- sooner rather  
> than later -- that the traditional way of commenting publicly on  
> each other's work, in the form of book reviews that sometimes  
> appear many years after the book, is becoming rapidly outdated.
>
> The future of scientific communication evidently lies in online  
> publications, blogs, etc., and online publications can easily be  
> enhanced by online reviews, online comments, etc.
>
> In a few years' time, we will probably have the first linguistics  
> journals that work in the following way: As soon as a paper is  
> submitted, it is made available on the journal's site, and public  
> comments are invited. After a brief veetting procedure, most of  
> these are published alongside the paper, and after a while the  
> editors decide whether to give the contribution "officially  
> published" status (perhaps after suitable revision). If a paper is  
> denied that status, it can stay there (in limbo, but still  
> accessible) or it can be withdrawn and submitted elsewhere.
>
> Well, this is just one model of so many possibilities. But we  
> should not invest many energies into the good old book review  
> anymore. It will be a nice memory for the older generation, but the  
> future lies elsewhere.
>
> Greetings,
> Martin
>
> -- 
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
> Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher  
> Platz 6	
> D-04103 Leipzig      Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.)  
> +49-341-980 1616
>
> Glottopedia - the free encyclopedia of linguistics
> (http://www.glottopedia.org)
>
>
>
>
>
>