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Even if Robbins Burling's point about ethics were irrelevant: The
traditional system of publishing linguistics books and journals has
simply become dysfunctional, even for academics themselves. It's
difficult to understand why we should pay EUR 150 for a grammar if
other, similarly good grammars can be downloaded for free. (And
electronic copies are increasingly regarded as the primary versions
of books and articles, from which printed and bound copies can be
easily derived.)<br>
<br>
The reason most scholars still find it important to go with major
publishers/imprints is not just that tenure or promotion committees
are lazy – the reason is that all aspects of careers are built on
peer recognition, and publication with a major imprint (or in a
major journal) is the clearest sign of peer recognition. Your tenure
committee may be very understanding, but your peers in general will
be much more likely to read your work if it is published
prominently. (I don't recall ever having seen the Garo grammar cited
that Burling published in India in 2004.) And the more prominent the
publisher is, the more they can charge for the books. As Harvard
linguist Stuart Shieber has argued cogently at the last LSA, <a
href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/01/29/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies/">the
market doesn't work</a> – prices don't go down for more widely
read books and journals.<br>
<br>
So dissemination and peer recognition, once closely bound up in
books, have been decoupled: Dissemination is done much more
efficiently via PDFs on Academia.edu, but peer recognition still
hinges on journal and imprint names. Paradoxically and absurdly,
many of us often read PDF manuscripts accessed and downloaded via
Google Scholar, but we cite them after their "proper" publication in
a recognized journal or imprint.<br>
<br>
How to bring dissemination and peer recognition back together? One
method is author-pays open-access, where the author (or her proxy)
pays the publisher – for example, <a
href="http://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/Pricing/pricing">De Gruyter</a>
charges about EUR 9000 for a 300-page book. But the problem of
market dysfunction still remains: The better and the more
prestigious the open-access books, the higher will be the author
charges. So if I pay EUR 9,000 for publishing my excellent
manuscript, chances are that the same publisher will charge the next
author EUR 10,000 (I've discussed this in more detail <a
href="http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2013/02/14/science-publication-should-be-seen-as-a-public-service-just-like-science-itself/">here</a>).
The market can bring down the prices only if we could easily replace
a publisher by another one offering the same services. But as long
as the imprint is owned by the service-provider/publisher, they will
charge whatever they can for their invaluable imprint, which we have
to use to build our careers.<br>
<br>
So we need to decouple the publishing services from the imprint. The
imprint is what has systemic relevance for the academic system – and
the main work for maintaining the imprint is being done by us,
authors and reviewers. The imprint should therefore be owned by the
academics themselves, e.g. by scholarly associations like ALT, or by
universities. This should guarantee that any profits made from the
imprint don't go outside academia.<br>
<br>
And here's a concrete implementation of this vision: Last autumn
Stefan Müller (FU Berlin) started an <a
href="http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/OALI/">open-access initiative</a>,
which I joined, and the result (to be unveiled soon) is the
publishing imprint "<b>Language Science Press</b>". We don't have a
major funder yet (though we have applied for funding), but we think
that electronic linguistics books can be published quite cheaply if
the imprint is embraced by the community of linguists. What we need
for this to become a success is (i) volunteers who will serve as
reviewers of manuscripts even if they are not rewarded with money,
(ii) dedicated series editors, and (iii) authors who are willing to
submit their manuscripts in a well-formatted way (ideally in LaTeX).<br>
<br>
Hosting the books will be taken care of by FU Berlin, and we'll link
them to various print-on-demand services. The idea is that all the
books published by Language Science Press will be high-quality,
peer-reviewed, and will eventually carry the same prestige as books
published by traditional major publishers. And we hope that we can
do all this without charging anyone. I am planning to start a book
series "Studies in Diversity Linguistics" for grammars and
typological books. If you think this is an idea worth supporting,
please sign as a supporter (<a
href="http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/OALI/sign/supporters">joining over
250 others</a>), or better yet, <a
href="http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/OALI/sign/reviewers">volunteer as a
reviewer</a>.<br>
<br>
Greetings,<br>
Martin Haspelmath<br>
<br>
P.S. Here are some links to related enterprises:<br>
– Open Library of Humanities: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.openlibhums.org/">https://www.openlibhums.org/</a><br>
– Open Edition Books: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.openedition.org/11942">http://www.openedition.org/11942</a><br>
– Edition Open Access: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.edition-open-access.de/">http://www.edition-open-access.de/</a><br>
– UC Publications in Linguistics: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.escholarship.org/uc/ucpress_ucpl">http://www.escholarship.org/uc/ucpress_ucpl</a>
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