[Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access

[Hedvig Skirgård]

It might interest you all that Steve Moitozo III said on twitter that this
probably will only effect 5% of its users, based on actual Ethnologue user
stats.

http://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/ethnologue-institutes-pay-wall-after-7.html

This paywall doesn't (yet) apply to the glossaries, the ISO 639-3 pages and
other material they maintain, but I've heard rumours of the glossaries
moving to only paperback.

Like Martin and Dan said, it is not that surprising. Personally I wish
there was a way for Ethnologue to have stable regular academic funding, but
I don't know enough about the situation to know whether that's possible and
desirable.

/Hedvig

*Hedvig Skirgård*
PhD Candidate
The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

School of Culture, History and Language
College of Asia and the Pacific

Rm 4203, H.C. Coombs Building (#9)
The Australian National University

Acton ACT 2601

Australia

Ph: +61 (0)451 878 060

E: hedvig.skirgard at anu.edu.au

On 31 December 2015 at 08:47, stephen morey <moreystephen at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> SIL is also the registration authority for ISO 639-3, the set of language
> codes that we are increasingly required to use (for grant applications,
> archiving and in some cases for journal articles).
>
> As far as I know access to the ISO 639-3 site,
> http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/, continues to be open.
>
> Stephen Morey
>
> ------------------------------
> From: DEVERETT at bentley.edu
> To: haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
> Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2015 21:41:11 +0000
> CC: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access
>
>
> It is not at all clear that SIL is trying to make money. Maintaining these
> pages costs thousands of dollars per month and, as Martin says, SIL has no
> academic funding. Its funding comes from churches by and large and they
> have no particular interest in supporting non-mission related academics. I
> strongly urge the academic community to develop its own resources in this
> area.
>
> DLE
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Dec 30, 2015, at 16:28, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> wrote:
>
> Yes, that's true, and here's the description:
> http://www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog/m-paul-lewis/ethnologue-launches-subscription-service
>
> They say you can access seven data pages per month for free.
>
> I don't find this surprising. Ethnologue (and the entire academic branch
> of SIL) has no proper academic funding, so it's normal that they are trying
> to make some money out of their flagship publication.
>
> Incidentally, Glottolog has no proper funding either, but as it is now
> hosted by MPI-SHH in Jena (http://www.shh.mpg.de/48816/research_outline),
> at least its continued existence is assured for the next dozen years or so.
>
> (I think we should try to tell our administrators that it makes little
> sense to try to sell academic publications. Instead, they should by
> properly funded by the academic publishers themselves, in order not to
> drive academics even further into questionable practices
> <http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2015/12/18/is-our-scholarship-based-on-illegal-foundations/>
> .)
>
> Martin
>
> On 30.12.15 22:16, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> does any one know whether the access to the Ethnologue is going to be by paid subscription only? When trying to routinely access the information about a random language, I got a screen advertising paid subscription for $60 per year, and there is no way to bypass it and get access to the information which was freely available a week ago. This looks pretty distressing.
>
> Best,
>
> Peter
>
>
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10	
> D-07745 Jena
> &
> Leipzig University
> Beethovenstrasse 15
> D-04107 Leipzig
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
> _______________________________________________ Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20151231/5cd10c1a/attachment.htm>