We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) This is the tenth installment, for 2024.
Books and series
In 2024, we published 37 books:
95 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2024, for a grand total of 975 since 2014. In 2023, 109 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 34 series (+2). In 2024, we accepted World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology and Open Text Collections as new series.
Reviewing
The median time from submission to decision is now 75 days (-32). The median time from submission to publication was 345 days (-1).
The acceptance rate (counting desk rejections) is 56.98% (-1.04) over all series. Only considering submissions where the manuscript had gone into peer review, the acceptance rate is 91.69% (+0.66).
Downloads
In 2024, LangSci pdfs were downloaded 361,758 times (-65,801 compared to 427,559 in 2023), for a grand total of 2,709,495.
This excludes downloads by search engine robots.
The most popular work is A aquisição da língua materna e não materna with 100,010 downloads, followed by Grammatical theory (all four editions) with 96,004 downloads and Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (all three editions) with 95,326 downloads.
Considering only the year 2023, the most downloaded books were:
- Machine translation for everyone: 13,873 downloads
- Arabic and contact-induced change: 12,594
- A grammar of Rapa Nui: 7,242 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, 303 linguists from all over the world have participated in proofreading. The most prolific proofreader is Jeroen van de Weijer, who has proofread chapters of 156 books.
There are currently 579 proofreaders registered with Language Science Press (+46).
For our 34 series, we are happy to be able to rely on 517 members in editorial boards from 56 different countries on 6 continents.
Paperhive
Of the books published in 2024, 31 went through proofreading on Paperhive. A total of 31,809 comments were left, for an average of 1026.10 per book, or 2.32 comments per page. The book with the most comments was Linguistics Olympiad (3,463). The total number of books which have completed proofreading on Paperhive is 218. Total number of comments over all books is 156,528 (mean: 721.3, median: 657, 1.99 comments/page).
CO₂
We traveled to conferences in Bochum, Poznań, Marburg, Prag, Leiden, and Graz by train (all renewable energy except the stretch from the German border to Poznań). For the second time in our history, we took the plane to travel to the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea in Helsinki. In Helsinki, we learned that travel by boat would actually have been possible, which we would have preferred.
Finances
We had a revenue of 145,700.13 € (+ 3,455.25 €) in 2024 and expenditures of 141,452.43 € (-8,392.32 €). The main cost items are personnel (103,788.13 €), service providers (6,879.14 €), rent (10,770.00 €), travel (2,858.41 €), and book copies (8,148.53 €). We moved office and had some purchases related to that, for a total of 5,119.59€. There were three employees, who, for the first time, all had the same nationality, and no others.
Our revenue is higher than last year, our costs are lower, and the number of books published has risen. This leads to the average price per book going down to 3,823.04.
The lion’s share of our revenue comes from institutional memberships via Knowledge Unlatched (135,975.00 €). 9,259.61 € come from print margins, the rest is from diverse sources.
Note that none of theses figures include VAT.