We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.) This is the ninth installment, for 2023.
Books and series
In 2023, we published 30 books:
109 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2022, for a grand total of 880 since 2014. In 2022, 86 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 32 series (+2). In 2023, Frame-Based Approaches to Semantics and Current Issues in Celtic Linguistics were accepted as new series.
Reviewing
The median time from submission to decision is now 107 days (+5). The median time from submission to publication was 346 days (+1).
The acceptance rate (counting desk rejections) is 58.02% (+1.92) over all series. Only considering submissions where the manuscript had gone into peer review, the acceptance rate is 91.03% (+0.83).
Downloads
In 2023, LangSci pdfs were downloaded 427,559 times (+4,308 compared to 423,251 in 2022), for a grand total of 2.347.737.
This excludes downloads by search engine robots.
The most popular work is A aquisição da língua materna e não materna with 93,709 downloads, followed by Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (all three editions) with 88,850 downloads, and Grammatical theory (all four editions) with 80,194 downloads.
Considering only the year 2023, the most downloaded books were:
- Machine translation for everyone: 9,399 downloads
- Grammatical theory: 8,707 downloads
- Arabic and contact-induced change: 8,589 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, 289 linguists from all over the world have participated in proofreading. The most prolific proofreader is Jeroen van de Weijer, who has proofread chapters of 135 books.
There are currently 533 proofreaders registered with Language Science Press (+42).
For our 32 series, we are happy to be able to rely on 468 members in editorial boards from 53 different countries on 6 continents.
Paperhive
Of the books published in 2023, 25 went through proofreading on Paperhive. A total of 16,129 comments were left, for an average of 645.16 per book, or 1.83 comments per page. The book with the most comments was Language contact (1483). The total number of books which have completed proofreading on Paperhive is 187. Total number of comments over all books is 127,979 (mean: 684, median: 636.5, 1.92 comments/page).
CO₂
We traveled to conferences in Köln, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Potsdam, and Poznań by train (all renewable energy except the stretch from the German border to Poznań). For the first time in our history, we took the plane to travel to the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea in Athens, for emissions of 0.66t, which were compensated.
Finances
We had a revenue of 142,244.88 (+ 9,468.92€) in 2023 and expenditures of 149,844.75 € (+ 6,501.13€). The main cost items are personnel (117,733.31 €), service providers (17,023.85 €), rent (7,200.00 €), travel (3,952.33€), and book copies (3,681.70 €). We did not really invest in gear (24,37 €). 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 5000 € rather than 4800 €. The rise is mainly due to inflation
The lion’s share of our revenue comes from institutional memberships via Knowledge Unlatched (116,000 €). 10,349 € come from print margins, the rest is from diverse sources.
Note that none of theses figures include VAT.