Open Linguistics

[Stefan Müller]

Dear colleagues,

I am writing to you since I got several emails during the last day by
people who were getting email from the De Gruyter Open's journal Open
Linguistics. They were asking whether this had anything to do with the
Berlin/Leipzig initiative for open access publications in linguistics
(Language Science Press).

The answer is: no. Language Science Press is a non-profit organization,
while De Gruyter is a commercial publisher that charges customers or
authors in the same way as other high-price publishers in the field. De
Gruyter Open is a branch of De Gruyter that publishes Gold open access,
so it is free for the readers, but it is not free for authors.

I got an email from De Gruyter Open yesterday advertising Open
Linguistics. Many of you probably got one too or will get one in the
next few days. The email said that publishing in the journal would be
free. However, this is highly misleading, since only the first two
issues are free, as stated on their web-page:

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opli

Information about the prices is not provided, but other publishers
charge authors between $2500-5000 (Springer, Elsevier) for open access
publishing of articles.

(see
http://blog.scielo.org/en/2013/09/18/how-much-does-it-cost-to-publish-in-open-access/,
compare the numbers to the $130 that are the average costs of an article
in SciELO in Brazil)

I feel we are now at a turning point. The publication system is starting
to change and we have to be very careful not to get onto a different
wrong track but to do it right. Martin Haspelmath put together a
description of the situation and posted this to the free-science blog:

http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2014/04/15/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-linguistics-publishing/

You can add and comment there. Martin also asked De Gruyter for a statement.

The crucial point is: If we submit to such new journals or work for them
as editors or reviewers we help establish a brand. The more prestige
is associated with this brand the higher the author processing charges
will be. An example is Cell, run by Elsevier. They have an acceptance
rate of 4% and charge authors $5000 per paper. I asked Angelika Lex
(vice president of Elsevier) about the justification for this and she
said it is a lot of work to organize the reviewing (done by scientists,
not by Elsevier) and they invested in infrastructure. The discussion can
be downloaded here:

http://www.ibi.hu-berlin.de/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/open_access/podiumsdiskussion

The question starts at 1:55:51.

So by working for profit-oriented publishers we make it more expensive
for us and others to publish with them. We use our research budgets (tax
payers money) to pay for the publishers rather then research staff or
hardware. Publishers will use this money to advance the concentration
process and buy up and close down smaller publishers (Niemeyer,
Oldenbourg, Akademie-Verlag, all went that way).

Instead of giving the brands to the publishers or let them create new
ones, journals and book outlets should be run by societies and
university presses. Publishers should be service providers (layout,
printing, distribution) but should not own the brands. This would ensure
that the prices stay reasonable (if a publisher requests too much, the
brand owners can switch to another one).

The mathematicians were quite successful with their Elsevier boycott at
http://thecostofknowledge.com/. They brought the online prices down to a
fraction of usual prices for online material:

http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2012/10/24/summary-of-oa-discussion-event-at-the-hu-with-participants-of-dfg-and-elsevier/

However, the prices for other disciplines did not change. Earlier I
considered to stop publishing in and reviewing for such journals, but
then decided that this is difficult since all these journals fulfill
certain purposes and are established in their niches.

http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2012/10/27/the-cost-of-knowledge/

Now, the situation with new journals is different. Why should we help
them on their way to become established journals? We should not!

So, I will neither publish in any newly founded journal by a
profit-oriented publisher (with the exception of edited volumes that
result from workshops) nor do any reviewing for them (exception: they
pay me for reviewing, I would donate the money to non-profit OA).

There are already non-commercial journals like the Journal of Langauge
Modelling (see Martin's post for a list) that we should use.

Sorry, for this lengthy email, but I think these things are important
for all of us. It is possible best to discuss these issues in the blog
rather then on the email lists, since several lists are involved and not
everybody reads all lists. Martin will also post to the Linguist list soon.

Best wishes and happy Easter holidays (for those who have any)

        Stefan


-- 
Stefan Müller      Tel: (+49) (+30) 838 52973
                   Fax: (+49) (030) 838 4 52973

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