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<div>Dear everyone,</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> Let me now say a couple of things about the
big points that went beyond my particular complaint. There are two
issues that have not been raised yet in public discussion on this
list.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> The first is particular to the publishing of
grammars of small, endangered languages. A major problem here is not
supply but demand. Although Bernard Comrie wrote an article titled
"Linguistics is about languages" over thirty years ago, it
still isn't true in the field in general. When Anke Beck was the
linguistics editor at Mouton, she told me that actually very few
people took advantage of the ALT/SSILA discounts. If the majority of
linguists regularly bought grammars, there would be more publishers of
grammars and prices would be more reasonable.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> The second is a more general phenomenon for academic
publishing. The availability of (illegal) pdfs of expensive scholarly
monographs is going to kill traditional academic publishing. Raising
prices on legal hardcopies (and legal e-books), and occasional
crackdowns on illegal pdfs, won't solve the problem. It's happened in
music, in movies, and in print journalism. Even Mouton's willingness
to serve the typological public is limited by the bottom line.
For-profit publishers will eventually get out. Most for-profit
linguistics publishers no longer publish scholarly monographs, just
reference materials and textbooks that make money (and even those are
threatened by digital technology). The rest will probably give up in
the near future, for economic reasons.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> Nigel's proposal is what will eventually have to
happen. It happened in physics, quite rapidly in fact; but that is a
different field. (And arxiv.org has submitted papers, not accepted
ones; so you still have to plough through the chaff as well as the
wheat to keep current.) It is happening painfully slowly in the
humanities. Print journals still dominate - "Linguistic
Discovery" and "Constructions" are pretty moribund.
Consider the documentary linguist wanting to publish a grammar: given
her/his need to have a good publication venue to get tenure, will s/he
publish with a long-established prestigious publisher whose grammar
series is edited by Bernard Comrie, Georg Bossong and Matthew Dryer,
or will s/he go to an untested online publisher whose editors are not
the very top typologists in the field? The same goes with other
linguistics subfields and publishers (it's going to be hard to match
the cachet of OUP and CUP, and the editors they are able to
attract).</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> Sorry to be pessimistic, but it's going to be
hard to break tradition. I fear things will get worse before they get
better. I personally don't want to see hardcopy publishing of
scholarly research go away, and would like to see it made somehow more
affordable (e.g. print on demand in a paperback format, as CUP has
done for its out of print titles). I will support or join efforts to
move to a better publication model than the current one for individual
scholars. But it will take time, maybe a long time.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Bill</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Dear All,<br>
I'll pass on all the issues about MDG and the costs of for-profit
publishing, though I recognise as Scott says that this was what Bill's
original post sought to address.<br>
<br>
I would however like to come back to the point that Mark raises in the
last para of his most recent message, and which surfaced in some of
the earlier contributions by Martin and others. The circle that that
has to be squared is that on the one hand academics need the
independent guarantees of quality that come with peer reviewing and
prestige associated with certain publication outlets, and on the other
we need to somehow to reduce the spiralling costs of these volumes
which put them beyond not only local communities but also fellow
researchers and indeed increasingly all but the best funded
libraries.<br>
<br>
The only answer it seems to me is to establish an online venue that is
prepared to be tough in terms of peer review and quality selection in
the way a top journal or publisher is but does not have high running
costs. It may take a while for such a venture to acquire prestige but
if enough of us were prepared to commit to it, I believe it would be
possible and worth doing. Is it something we should have a little
online working group to try and investigate and perhaps develop a
proposal?</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
best,<br>
Nigel<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA<br>
Honorary Professor of General & Romance Linguistics<br>
The University of Manchester<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Vice-President for Research & HE
Policy, The British Academy</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>School of Languages, Linguistics &
Cultures</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The University of Manchester</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Manchester M13 9PL</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>UK</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>(+ 44) (0)161 275 3194</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite
>http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<hr></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Tahoma" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b>From:</b> Discussion List for ALT
[LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] on behalf of Post, Mark
[mark.post@JCU.EDU.AU]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Tuesday, November 15, 2011 6:15 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Publishing</font><br>
<font face="Tahoma" size="-1" color="#000000"></font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Dear Typologists,<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Looking back over this very
thought-provoking exchange, I think I can reconstruct some of its more
"heated" aspects to the following discursive events:<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>(1) Bill Croft
criticized a particular policy decision at MDG which related to
discounted pricing of MGL volumes, among others.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>(2) I suggested that
this was one facet of a larger problem regarding the pricing of
minority language description in general, and continued to use the
example of MGL because it illustrated the point well enough.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Some listmembers took this as implying
that<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>(3) MDG should be
singled-out among academic publishers for its prohibitive pricing of
language description, perhaps further implying there are at least some
academic publishers who provide the same quality at more affordable
rates, and that MDG's failure to do so was a matter of choice, or
greed, etc.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I don't think that (3) need follow from
(1) and (2), but to the extent that my post served to bias the
discussion in that direction, I apologize to Uri, to Frans, and to
others at or associated with MDG who, indeed, quite obviously work
hard to successfully bring out high-quality linguistic research. I
obviously don't know what MGL's profit margins are, and it
doesn't surprise me to hear suggestions that MDG might not be making
much of a profit from this particular series.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>But whether MDG is the worst or the best
of the worst is not the point I was trying to focus on. Whatever the
reasons, the facts remain that the pricing of MGL volumes - among,
yes, very many other journals and book series published in linguistics
today, whether by MDG or by other publishers - renders them
unaffordable, and the research contained within them inaccessible, to
a great number of researchers, and that this problem is particularly
acute in regions of the world from which much of modern language
description originates. And I am, actually, surprised to hear
suggestions here and there that only a "handful" of people in such
regions might make use of language description, or that the use to
which they might put language description might or might not be valid
or valuable in some sense. In my admittedly limited experience,
members of minority language communities are often very, very keen to
examine anything which has been written about them or their languages,
and local researchers - whether they are "community members" or
not - are in fact very frequently in need of materials relating to
languages of their region that can't be accessed for economic
reasons (I, at least, seem to get emails requesting a .pdf of this or
that book all the time). It seems to me that making descriptive
materials accessible to these types of user should be a top priority.
If for-profit publishing is in principle incapable of doing this -
which is one way of interpreting several posts in this thread, at
least - then participation in for-profit publishing seems unethical,
at least where minority language description is concerned, presuming
one has any real choice in the matter.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The problem, of course, is that we seem
to lack acceptable alternatives. Few of us are free to pick and choose
among publishers on the basis of purely economic or ethical
considerations, and most of us exist in academic regimes in which
"output" is not recognized unless it has the blessing of a
publisher, "quality" is quantified in ways that do not invoke
accessibility, and both promotions and research funding are contingent
on such "quality output". So, picking up on some earlier points
made by Harald, Martin and others, it does seem to me that we, as
editors, as reviewers, as authors, as advisory board members to
funding agencies and (maybe) as university administrators, need to try
to steer academic publishing back into the universities -
universities being repositories of prestige, as well as capacity -
and toward open-access/print-on-demand models. And I repeat here my
wish to continue to hear suggestions for how this might be effectively
accomplished, or to learn why exactly it is either impractical or
undesirable.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>All the best,<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Mark<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Mark W. Post, PhD<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Postdoctoral Research Fellow in
Anthropological Linguistics<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The Cairns Institute<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>James Cook University<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Smithfield, QLD 4878<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Australia<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Tel: +61-7-4042-1898<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Eml: mark.post@jcu.edu.au<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Web:
http://jamescook.academia.edu/MarkWPost<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<div><br></div>
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