We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). This is the eighth installment, for 2022.
Books and series
In 2022, we published 30 books:
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86 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2022, for a grand total of 771 since 2014. In 2021, 81 works had been proposed.
The following figure gives a breakdown of the distribution of these works and their states of completion:
Series
There are currently 30 series (+1). In 2022, Estudios de Lingüística Amerindia / Estudos de Linguística Ameríndia / Studies of Amerindian Linguistics / Études de Linguistique Amérindienne was accepted as a quadrilingual new series.
Reviewing
The median time from submission to decision is now 102 days (-2). The median time from submission to publication was 345 days (±0).
The acceptance rate (counting desk rejections) is 56.10% (+0.67) over all series. Only considering submissions where the manuscript had gone into peer review, the acceptance rate is 90.20% (+0.73).
Downloads
In 2022, LangSci pdfs were downloaded 423,251 times (+111,859 compared to 311,392 in 2022), for a grand total of 1,884,548.
This excludes downloads by search engine robots.
The most popular work is A aquisição da língua materna e não materna with 87,744 downloads, followed by Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (all three editions) with 85,444 downloads, and Grammatical theory (all four editions) with 69,821 downloads.
Considering only the year 2022, the most downloaded books were:
- A aquisição de língua materna e não materna: 10,552 downloads
- Arabic and contact-induced change: 9,781 downloads
- Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: 9,055 downloads
Community involvement
Language Science Press is a community enterprise. We rely on the community for authoring and reviewing, but also for typesetting and proofreading. Across all published books, 314 linguists from all over the world have participated in proofreading. The most prolific proofreader is Jeroen van de Weijer, who has proofread chapters of 116 books.
We changed our proofreading setup to mailing list, getting rid of some inactive addresses in the process. This means that there are currently 491 proofreaders registered with Language Science Press (-12).
For our 30 series, we are happy to be able to rely on 508 members in editorial boards from 52 different countries on 6 continents.
Paperhive
Of the books published in 2022, 23 went through proofreading on Paperhive. A total of 16,345 comments were left, for an average of 711 per book, or 2.08 comments per page. The book with the most comments was The negative existential cycle (1488). The total number of books which have completed proofreading on Paperhive is 162. Total number of comments over all books is 111,060 (mean: 683, median: 645.5, 1.95 comments/page).
CO₂
We traveled to conferences Marseille, Leeuwarden, Oxford, Potsdam, Paris, Gent, and Prague. 9,697km by train (0.04t CO₂), exactly 1,000km by car (0.19t CO₂). The comparable CO₂ footprint of plane travel would have been 2.88t.
Finances
We had a revenue of 132,775.95 (- 2,081.61€) in 2022 and expenditures of 143,343.62 € (+ 16,906.19€). The main cost items are personnel (108,662.50 €), service providers (19,265.86 €), rent (6,000.00 €), travel (5,449.82€), book copies (3,527.26 €), and gear (438,18 €). A total of four employees of three different nationalities have received a salary from Language Science Press (none of them full time, and only two of them 12 months).
Our costs are higher than last year, while the number of books published is again 30. Our cost per book is now 4,800 € where it was 4,200 € before. This is basically because we are training a new employee to be able to handle a higher output in the years to come.
The lion’s share of our revenue comes from institutional memberships via Knowledge Unlatched (116,000 €). 10,308.99 € come from print margins, the rest is from diverse sources.
Note that none of theses figures include VAT.