[HPSG-L] Do not work for / publish with Elsevier, please (like Stanford, Harvard and so on)
Stefan Müller
St.Mueller at hu-berlin.de
Thu Aug 27 08:39:56 UTC 2020
Dear oe, dear farell and everybody else who wrote me in private and
those who are interested in this issue,
Am 24.08.20 um 19:53 schrieb Stephan Oepen:
>
> but i understand your message to our professional community mailing
> list as not only condoning but actually encouraging what i consider
> unprofessional and unethical behavior.
This is very interesting. There is the concept of strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action
Striking can cause severe damage. If people in public transport systems
strike they can delay the workings of cities and bring them to a halt.
The taxi drivers of Berlin protested against Uber and shut down TXL.
https://www.rbb24.de/wirtschaft/beitrag/2020/02/berlin-streik-taxifahrer-schoenefeld-rueckkehrpflicht-flughafen.html
You could say: wow, how unethical of these bus drivers/cab drivers. They
cause a lot of economical damage. They should shut up and work for their
9,50€. What? Minimum wages? I do not care, I want to have cheap
tickets/a cheap ride. (As a related side remark: many of our students
work as cab drivers, I even had cab drivers with a habilitation ...)
If you look at mathematics and their action, the cost of knowledge, you
see that this community was organized enough to defeat Elsevier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
Elsevier gave in at a certain point and wrote a letter to the
mathematicians:
> On the same day, Elsevier released an open letter to the mathematics
> community, stating that its target is to reduce its prices to
> $11/article or less.^[29]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge#cite_note-newsci-29>
> Elsevier also opened the archives of 14 mathematics journals back to
> 1995 with a four-year moving wall.^[29]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge#cite_note-newsci-29>
> In late 2012, Elsevier made all of its "primary mathematics" journals
> open access up to 2008.^[32]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge#cite_note-32> The
> boycott remains in effect.
So, Elsevier moved. But for mathematics only. Not for Linguistics,
Chemistry or Biology. Since we are happy to pay.
A Zombie Lingua papers cost $20
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102923
Neurolinguistics $40
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100912
Publishing an OA paper in Cell costs $5900/5170€. This is the price list:
https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/article-publishing-charge.xlsx
The work is done for free by reviewers. So the costs for Elsevier are
minimal. If you work with a publisher as service provider, as Glossa
does, you will have processing costs of about 350€ and this includes a
reasonable profit margin for the service provider. The fair cost of an
OA paper was set to be 400€.
This is more information on fair OA:
https://www.fairopenaccess.org/
Fair OA limits the APCs in a different way nowadays since publication
under the FairOA label has to be free in principle for everybody. This
means that the APCs are higher since they cross-finance other authors
who cannot pay. The limit is $1000.
Assuming the costs to be 400€, this means that 4770€ of the Author
Processing Charge (APC) go to Elsevier for nothing. A paper in Lingua is
$2700. For your information: De Gruyter calculates internally with 800€
per paper including a profit margin, the DGfS pays De Gruyter 1200€ per
paper (so publishing is free for authors).
If you want to know what running a journal used to cost and used to
entail in terms of service and what it involves nowadays, you may watch
this talk by Klaus Mikus:
https://tube.switch.ch/videos/0ce44cdd
He was running Wiley journals and runs you through the budget of
journals. He also comments on the profit rates 60-80%. Unfortunately the
video is in German.
Note please what leading universities suggest:
> For example, a resolution by Stanford University
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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".^[29]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-29> Similar
> guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been
> passed by the University of California
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California>, Harvard
> University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University>, and
> Duke University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_University>.^[30]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-30>
All this is linked from within Wikipedia. When I suggest here not to
work for Elsevier, I make the same suggestions as Stanford, University
of California, Harvard, Duke and several Dutch and German big players.
I quote a recent press release of the University of California (San
Diego is a part of this):
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/uc-and-elsevier/
> *Background:*
> In close consultation with all 10 campus libraries and the Academic
> Senate
> <https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/academic-council-statement-elsevier-feb28.pdf>,
> the University of California is working to hold down the rapidly
> escalating costs associated with for-profit journals and to facilitate
> open access publishing of UC research.
>
> UC’s last contract with Elsevier expired as of January 1, 2019, and
> Elsevier has discontinued UC’s access via its online platform,
> ScienceDirect, to articles published since that date (and some older
> articles). The UC Libraries are carefully evaluating the impact of
> losing access to new articles on ScienceDirect, and are committed to
> ensuring that members of the UC community have access to the articles
> they need.
>
Germany and the Netherlands have similar situations. This means that
people who publish with Elsevier not only publish in open access, even
the paywall content is not available to many researchers since Elsevier
blocks it since the institutions or even complete countries like the
Netherlands are not paying the fees any longer.
Yes, and also research funders are kept busy talking about all this.
There is the Plan S where S stands for shock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
Research founding agencies from 11 European countries initiated Plan S.
They make it mandatory that the research they found is availible to
everybody and that the results are published under the following ten
principles:
> The ten principles are:
>
> 1. authors should retain copyright
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright> on their publications,
> which must be published under an open license such as Creative
> Commons <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons>;
> 2. the members of the coalition should establish robust criteria and
> requirements for compliant open access journals and platforms;
> 3. they should also provide incentives for the creation of compliant
> open access journals and platforms if they do not yet exist;
> 4. publication fees should be covered by the funders or universities,
> not individual researchers;
> 5. such publication fees should be standardized and capped;
> 6. universities, research organizations, and libraries should align
> their policies and strategies;
> 7. for books and monographs, the timeline may be extended beyond 2021;
> 8. open archives and repositories are acknowledged for their importance;
> 9. hybrid open-access journals
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_open-access_journal> are not
> compliant with the key principle;
> 10. members of the coalition should monitor and sanction non-compliance.
>
Please note points 9. and 5. Zombie Lingua is a hybrid journal and the
prices were given above. Zombie Lingua is very close to hell on the
compatibility scale with Plan S.
A list of member organisations can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Member_organisations
A list of supportive orgaanizations is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S#Institutional_statements_of_support
And there is also DEAL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_DEAL
I reject the approach for reasons also explained in Wikipedia. But I
quote the passage on Elsevier, the only one of the big publishers that
refused to find a compromise:
>
> Negotiations with Elsevier
>
> Negotiations between Projekt DEAL and Elsevier started in 2016. No
> agreement could be reached on a new model under the terms of Projekt
> DEAL, and the negotiations were officially called off in July
> 2018.^[4] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_DEAL#cite_note-4> In
> support of Projekt DEAL’s mandate to negotiate centrally, ca. 200
> German Universities did not renew their expiring individual contracts
> with Elsevier starting January 2017.^[5]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_DEAL#cite_note-5> Dozens of
> German researchers resigned from their editor roles for Elsevier
> journals to strengthen Projekt DEAL’s push for open access.^[6]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_DEAL#cite_note-6> ^[7]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_DEAL#cite_note-7>
>
As you can see, all this goes on for years now. It binds considerable
resources and it is not just weirdos like little Stefan who compares the
situation with a strike. The publication crisis is massive and it is
dealt with on the national level in the Netherlands on the highest level
of research founders and/or rectors conferences of universities in
several countries.
Librarians work hard in the background to guarantee supply of research
literature. You probably never notice what they are doing since if
things work well, there is no reason to think about this. But note that
libraries and more central institutions are paid by us, the taxpayer as
well. For example, there are Fachinformationsdienste in Germany. This is
special units usually associated with university libraries and
responsible for certain disciplines. They used to be called
Sondersammelgebiet and they are financed by the DFG (which is financed
by the tax payer).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachinformationsdienste_f%C3%BCr_die_Wissenschaft
For example, the FID Linguistics is in Frankfurt/M. There are others for
Romance, Slavic and so on. Since the role of these FIDs in times of the
publication crisis changes, they now also organize workshops for helping
scientific societies on their way to fair open access. Last year, all
scientific societies of all disciplines were invited and met for several
days in Göttingen to discuss the solutions that have been found so far.
I took part in this as representative of the DGfS, the German
linguistics society that by now has an OA journal without publishing fees.
Why do I mention all this? To show you that there is a real problem and
that lots and lots of people are working on this issue. This would not
be necessary if (the big commercial) publishers were service providers
and left us room to breathe. We, the scientific community, are in
defense mode.
Again, talk to your librarian. If you meet her/him in a bar, she/he may
tell you about the contracts (remember the non-disclosure agreements?).
But coming back to the Lingua/Glossa issue:
The focus of my mail was not Elsevier (and Wiley and Springer) in total
but Zombie Lingua in particular. And Zombie Lingua is a very special
case. There is no reason to publish there. And there is no reason to
work for this journal. As I said in the previous mail: The complete
editorial team (6 people) and the editorial board (31 people) left and
founded the fair OA journal Glossa. So there is nothing left of Lingua.
Elsevier recreated it by putting together a new board.
If you publish with them now you are a blackleg (Streikbrecher,
streikbreaker). You are working against all the people and institutions
mentioned above. Of course you could claim: "Oh, I did not know of the
strike, I just came to work and want to ride my bus now. And by the way,
I do not care that I am underpaid and have no time to go to the loo."
I am here in front of the bus station to make you aware of the strike
and to ask you for solidarity with those who do not get the positions in
academia in the first place since we give our money away to those guys
(yes, guys). Remember: 37% means 370.000€ of 1 Mio. 73% means 730.000€
of 1Mio. Given to the shareholders. For nothing.
So: Do you think that striking bus drivers are acting unethical? I do
not think so.
>
> subversively stalling the review cycle can negatively impact the
> careers of our colleagues, in particular more junior ones—for example
> delaying dissertations or promotions.
>
As for delaying the review process, you may ask the editors of journals
I reviewed for. I can send you many surprised mails informing me that I
broke all records ever by delivering my reviews within a day or within a
week. And those who worked with me know how detailed my reviews are.
But this is of course different during a strike. [As you know from my
mail to Chris, there was no actual delay in the case at hand since
Elsevier got informed about my email to the HPSG list, so everything was
within normal reaction times]
What I try here is make enough noise so that everybody becomes aware of
the fact that there are striking people and that it would be better not
to enter the bus station. Maybe people start thinking about the issues
and decide it is better not to submit to Zombie Lingua. I gave you the
reasons (quality of the journal in general, quality of the review
process, quality of proofreading and copy editing).
Independent of me not answering the review request, the time of
reviewing will be longer, since science in general is in a review
crisis. Everybody wants to have a review of everything and if a journal
is low in prestige, people are not willing to review for it. This is the
case for Zombie Lingua and hence processing articles will take long or
they will not get proper reviewing.
I wrote the email to indirectly inform the authors, to tell them about
my concerns and make them aware of Glossa. So, I am actually helping
them and also anybody else who might not have noticed that Lingua is
Zombie Lingua now.
> I truly believe what you are suggesting is wrong (“blacklisting"
> really has a bad history, specially in the US against
> “communists”/black leaders and trade union leaders)
Have a look at who works/worked with me. I am very open and do not
blacklist. I work with women and men (more women actually), with people
of all sexual preferences, with people from all over the world (China,
Denmark, France, Iran, UK, Korea, China), with people of all religions
(with headscarf and without, me organizing rooms for prayer), even
people with weird political opinions and one even thinks Corona is a
flue. You may ask anybody from my team about these things.
I am very sensitive to these issues since I am coming from a country
where political opinions played a role for people careers. Pupils who
went to the church had to stand up in school in front of the class. One
guy in my school became shepherd since he refused the military training
with automatic guns we had to take part in our school education. I
almost was not admitted to the school I went since I thought that
serving in the army for three years was a bad idea. I was 14 years old
when this political talk for admission took place.
What I think is different here is that the color of somebody's skin or
her/his political opinions do not matter in science. But publication and
dissemination of results and responsibility for research money is part
of our academic jobs.
> as a member of a search committee, i consider my responsibility to the
> applicants, the hiring institution, scientific quality, fairness, and
> transparency. unless it was part of the job announcement, a
> subjective and inherently moral knock-down criterion, in my view, is
> incompatible with that role.
The same here. There are two things to distinguish:
1) project staff, staff at my lab
I have very few positions to hire people for. Candidates usually have an
HPSG background, they know me, they were in contact before. They usually
know what I do in the publication business and I wrote these mails to
the list to make them aware that they might have considered publishing
with a dead corps just in case they wanted to publish with Zombie Lingua.
Once everybody knows the facts about Lingua/Glossa, there is clearly
also a quality issue that is relevant for hiring:
Everybody who submits as of today, knows that he/she submits to a low
quality journal, with bad reviewing and not to the journal that the name
used to represent. He/she is submitting to a journal hidden behind a
paywall, not even accessible to some libraries (because of failed
negotiations see above), even though a completely open journal with a
better board is available.
I have been working for open access since 2012. And yes, publication of
research results is our business, science organization is part of our
duties as scientists. Tax payers have the right to see what we are
doing. They pay for it. I have been running a project to establish
Language Science Press. This project was founded by the DFG with 576,989
€. My team helped to make Language Science Press a success (26 book
series, 127 published books, 25 forthcoming). When hiring new people it
is important to hire people that are compatible with the rest of the team.
All these criteria are criteria from within science. The normal
selection procedure.
Since we discuss these things here at some length we also have transparency.
We can discuss the details and I am constantly rethinking everything but
the general reasoning is clear. I hope.
2) professors
In a search committee for a professorship we are looking for senior
people. Professors are not just experts in their narrow area of
specializations they are also expected to be research managers. They
have responsibilities for research budgets of their lab, of their
institute and maybe of their faculty and their university one day. They
should know which journals are around, who does what, which journals are
cool, have good boards, good reviewing and so on. They are supposed to
write research grants, which includes research dissemination, which
includes budgets for publications and so on. They should have thought
about prices and where the money comes from. This is part of the job
profile.
Having published in Lingua since 2017 is a minus for an applicant for
all the reasons mentioned and discussed in the previous mail.
What do we want:
1) Publication in good journals: Zombie Lingua isn't one.
2) Reviewing for good journals: Zombie Lingua is not a good journal.
3) Getting money from outside the university: Spending money or cause
others to spend money on Zombie Lingua is the opposite.
Search committees have 6 to 10 sometimes even more people. I am one and
I will raise my concerns. This is normal and not unethical and it does
not have anything to do with blacklisting.
Raising these issues here is supposed to make people aware of the
situation and hence all this is also fully transparent.
Best wishes
Your bus driver
PS: I did not make the bus driver example up. Your bus drivers may wear
diapers because they cannot go to the toilet during their working hours.
This is from Nuremberg:
https://www.nordbayern.de/region/nuernberg/busfahrer-beklagt-belastende-zustande-bei-der-vag-1.9535197
This is from Seattle:
https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article134716724/Busfahrer-in-Seattle-muessen-Windeln-tragen.html
The fun aspect about the Nuremberg example is that this is public
transport payed by the city of Nuremberg. Cities usually do not have
enough money to pay public infrastructure and they try to cut them
short. If we are spending public money even if there is no need to do
so, we are acting unethically. It is our duty as people who are all
payed by the tax payer to avoid spending money wherever possible.
Just discovered a fun aspect of this discussion: both parties accuse the
other one of acting unethically and using moral arguments.
Hm.
Best
Stefan
>
> best wishes, oe
>
>
> On Mon, 24 Aug 2020 at 19:08 Stefan Müller <St.Mueller at hu-berlin.de
> <mailto:St.Mueller at hu-berlin.de>> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
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>
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>
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