35.835, FYI: Resignation of co-editors of Syntax

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-835. Tue Mar 12 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.835, FYI: Resignation of co-editors of Syntax

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Date: 09-Mar-2024
From: Klaus Abels [k.abels at ucl.ac.uk]
Subject: Resignation of co-editors of Syntax


We, Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn, are writing to the linguistics
community today to announce our resignation from our posts as the
editors of the journal Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental,
and Interdisciplinary Research. We are resigning to protest changes
imposed unilaterally by the journal’s publisher. At the same time we
are announcing the foundation of a new journal provisionally named
Syntactic Theory and Research, to continue the tradition of Syntax.

Suzanne was a founding editor of Syntax, and Klaus has been her
co-editor since 2013. Twenty-six years ago, Syntax was set up to
facilitate timely and cutting edge reports and dialogue among
colleagues in the field. We believe that Syntax has served this
function well. Apart from its high standards of content, Syntax stands
out, we believe, for its care and attention to detail in the
presentation of complex linguistic data and analysis. It is with a
heavy heart that we have come to the conclusion that our position as
editors of the journal is no longer tenable. Some of the members of
the journal's editorial board have joined us in resigning. In this
letter, we explain our reasoning and what we see as the way forward.

We believe that there are three key ways in which a good journal adds
value to scientific communication:
--Peer review ideally ensures the reliable and consistent selection of
the highest-quality papers and at the same time brings about an
improvement in each paper considered.
--Copyediting ensures that complex scientific ideas are communicated
clearly to the widest possible audience, including when authors are
nonnative users of academic English, and that the field’s standards
for written work (consistent glossing and translation of examples, the
Unified Style Sheet, etc.) are adhered to and exemplified.
--Professional publication ensures that material is permanently
accessible, indexed, searchable by search engines, and marketed to a
wide target audience.

The content of articles is provided by authors free of charge to the
publisher. Working members of the field carry out peer assessment of
papers free of charge to the publisher. Editors organize this process
and make decisions, free of charge or with nominal compensation. It
seems only fair that the academic community expects a high standard of
service in the areas traditionally covered by the publisher, which we
summarized above as copyediting and professional publication. Alas,
the publisher of Syntax, Wiley Blackwell, recently put a team with no
specialist knowledge of linguistics in charge of our editorial office.
In our assessment, the new office is not up to meeting the particular
challenges of dealing reliably with foreign-language character sets,
glosses and gloss alignment, tree diagrams, and standardized syntactic
formalism. This has ultimately led to our decision to resign effective
March 31, 2024.

We are now planning to start a new journal to take the mantle of
Syntax. The new journal will be "diamond open access": that is, no
fees will be required to publish a paper in the journal nor to access
the content. The diamond-open-access model of publishing seems to us
to be not only an ethical imperative but also scientifically mandated:
we cannot expect the great syntactic riches of understudied languages
to be brought to bear on syntactic theory unless native speaker
linguists of those languages, who may have few financial and
institutional resources to rely on, have access to cutting edge
research and can communicate their own findings to their colleagues
around the world without having to pay publication fees.

We have settled on Syntactic Theory and Research as a working title
for the new journal. The journal will be published by the Open Library
of Humanities and owned in perpetuity by the community. We are call on
all linguists to join us in making the new journal a success and will
reach out with concrete steps soon.

Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Syntax




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