[HPSG-L] Do not work for / publish with Elsevier, please (like Stanford, Harvard and so on)

[Stefan Müller]

Dear colleagues,

Yesterday I got a request to review an HPSG paper for the Zombie journal
Lingua. I am sort of shocked by this and I was tempted to reject this
request right away, but here is what I will do: I will delay the review
as long as possible and reject to review the paper then.

Background: In 2015 the complete editorial board of Lingua resigned (31
people) and founded a new (fair) open access journal Glossa with the
same editorial board and the same output of papers since.

https://www.rooryck.org/lingua-to-glossa

I will not hire people with publications in Lingua after the Glossa
transition. I will argue against people with Lingua publications in
their CV in any search committee I am in since I consider publishing in
Lingua unethical and against the scientific community.

Furthermore, due to the status as Zombie journal the number of
submissions to Lingua went down considerably, which of course has also
an influence on competition and quality. (details below)

Here are some further information on why working for Elsevier is
unethical and against the scientific community: Elsevier is a billion
dollar company that is basically killing academia. A parasite. They have
profit margins of 37% in 2018. For comparison, the German bank once
declared that they have a profit margin of 25% and this resulted in a
huge outcry in German society. Labels like "turbo capitalism" were
coined back then. Normal companies have profit margins of 5 or 7
percent. The food sector even less. About 3%.

37%! If a university pays 1Mio for journal access 370.000 go to share
holders. We can choose: Do we want to hire people or give our research
money to the share holders of Elsevier? (Springer is similar and Wiley
is even worse >70%!!)

And note, we are not just paying the profit margin, we are also paying
the income of the CEOs. I do not know the income of Elsevier's COEs, but
I know the income of Wiley's CEOs:

CEO salery

This is $16 Mio for five people. Per year.

These are quotes from the English Wikipedia:

> In 2018, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX group
> (₤2.538 billion of ₤7.492 billion). In operating profits
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Earnings_before_interest_and_taxes>,
> it represented 40% (₤942 million of ₤2,346 million). Adjusted
> operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2017 to
> 2018. Profits grew further from 2018 to 2019, to a total of £982
> million.
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Elsevier#cite_note-RELX_2018_Report-1>


> In the 21st century, the subscription rates charged by the company for
> its journals have been criticized; some very large journals (with more
> than 5,000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as £9,634, far
> above average, and many British universities pay more than a million
> pounds to Elsevier annually. The company has been criticized not only
> by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but
> also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them
> to afford current journal prices.
>
> For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out
> Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to
> their educational and research value", which librarians should
> consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute
> articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals
> that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing". Similar guidelines
> and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the
> University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.
>
> In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands
> announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to
> negotiate on any open access policy for Dutch universities. In
> December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in
> Germany, Peru, and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as
> negotiations had broken down with the publisher.
>
> A complaint about Elsevier/RELX was made to the UK Competition and
> Markets Authority in December 2016. In October 2018, a competition
> complaint against Elsevier was filed with the European Commission,
> alleging anticompetitive practices stemming from Elsevier's
> confidential subscription agreements and market dominance.
The whole scientific world is kept busy by finding ways to deal with
ever increasing prices and with the unethical practices by Elsevier. You
would think you can save money by cancelling one subscription of a
journal you do not need? No, Elsevier sells bundles and next year you
pay as much as last year but you have some journals less. Elsevier uses
non-disclosure agreements for making it impossible to compare prices.
Ask your librarian if you do not believe me. They will burst into tears
if you name Elsevier.

Librarians, research founders, university administrations spend hours
and hours to deal with the publication crisis. Publishing with Lingua in
such a situation is a sign of ignorance or uninformedness. Both are bad
for job opportunities.

If you want to publish in a responsible way, submit your papers to
Language, the Journal of Linguistics or the Journal of Language
Modelling. These are journals run by scholars or societies. The German
journal Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft is published by De Gruyter
but run by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. It is open
access (free for authors, fees are payed by us, the DGfS members) and
the journal accepts English contributions as well.

This is a list of journals I reviewed for and which are judged as OK or
not OK. Elsevier, Wiley, Springer are not OK.

https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/~stefan/gutachter.html

So, summing up:

People who work for and publish in Lingua behave unethical and harm
their field.

Authors who submit there submit to a zombie journal with low competition
since good and responsible authors boycott the journal.

Authors who submit there get low quality reviews since high profile
academics do not review for Lingua or Elsevier in general.

The reviewing process will be delayed since it is difficult to find
reviewers and people asked for reviews do not reply in time.

Please check the English Wikipedia entry to find more reasons for not
publishing with Elsevier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Academic_practices

One is this:

> In 2018, Elsevier reported a mean 2017 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Elsevier#cite_note-20>gender
> pay gap
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Gender_pay_gap> of
> 29.1% for its UK workforce, while the median was 40.4%, more than
> twice the UK average and by far the worst figure recorded by any
> academic publisher in UK. Elsevier attributed the result to the
> under-representation of women in its senior ranks and the prevalence
> of men in its technical workforce.
There is also racism, manipulation of citation indexes and so on.

Thanks for reading this far and it would really make my day if I saw
this paper published in another journal and no further submissions to
Lingua. =:-)

Best

    Stefan

Recommendations to deal with Zombie Lingua

1) Do not submit there.

2) If asked for review, do not reply via their editorial system.

    After some time send the editor an email explaining why you do not
work for Lingua/Elsevier.

3) If you cite work that appeared after January 17th 2017 in Lingua,
cite it as Zombie Lingua, eg:

Lin, Francis Y. 2017. A refutation of Universal Grammar. Zombie Lingua
193. 1–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lingua.2017.04.003.


Appendix:

Proof that Lingua is a low quality journal

Lingua was ranked 7th in Google Scholar’s h5-Index Top Publications –
Humanities, Literature & Arts, and 3rd in the subsection Language &
Linguistics in October 2015 (https://www.rooryck.org/lingua-to-glossa).

Now it is not contained in Humanities any longer and it is ranked 14 in
Language & Linguistics, but all papers with a high number of citations
that are responsible for this listing were published by the old
editorial team (they had contracts for volumes till beginning of 2017).

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=hum_languagelinguistics

In 2021, Lingua will be gone since the 2015 items will not be counted
for the h5 index and there aren't any new ones.

I also had a look at stuff published there. One piece is open access:

Lin, Francis Y. 2017. A refutation of Universal Grammar. Zombie Lingua
193. 1–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lingua.2017.04.003.

I had a look since the title caught my attention and I have to say it is
below any scientific standards. I am not a fan of UG, but the paper is
really bad. For example it argues that Chomsky is wrong in making claims
about languages since he has not seen/cannot examine all existing human
languages. (p.4)

Another pet peeve of mine is infinitely long sentences. The author goes
into some detail expalaining why we could in principle process
infinitely long sentences:

> A couple of clarifications are in order. First, one might object that
> an infinitely long sentence, e.g.:
> (11) John believes that Peter believes that Bob believes . . .
> is a sentence in a human language but the brain, being a finite
> substance, cannot process it. In fact there is no contradiction here.
> To say that (11) is a sentence in a human language is to say that
> speakers of that language can speak or understand it. In a strict
> sense, a human being cannot speak or understand an infinitely long
> sentence. So, what is going on here is that when saying that (11) is a
> human sentence we mean something like this: if there were no
> limitation on memory and other relevant factors, then humans would be
> able speak or understand it. In this sense, (11) is a human sentence;
> and in the same sense, it can be processed by the brain.
Note that no formally trained syntactician (in the Chomskyan tradition)
ever claimed that we can formulate or process infinitely long sentences.
We can't. And PSGs do not license infinitely long sentences. This is
easy to see if you consider Merge-based systems. If we combine words or
roots with a binary operation, we have objects of length two. We can
combine these with other simple or complex objects but all of these have
a finite length. So there is no way to get objects of infinite length.

Apart from formally and conceptually flawed content, the language is
week (even I with my limited command of English could spot this) and you
will find an example of this in the quote above. So, our high price
publisher does not even care for copy editing.

Conclusion: Do not submit there.

Thanks!

Best

    Stefan