We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020). This is the seventh installment, for 2021.
Books and series
In 2021, we published 30 books
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Achievements 2021
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Category Archives: statistics
Achievements 2020
We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). This is the sixth installment, for 2020.
Books and series
In 2020, we published 30 books, and the second edition of The verb in Nyakyusa as a bonus book.
101 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2020, for a total of 604. In 2019, 78 works had been proposed.
The following figure gives a breakdown of the distribution of these works and their states of completion
The most active series are Studies in Diversity Linguistics (69), Textbooks in Language Sciences (35), EOTMS (25), and Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing (24) .
Series
There are currently 27 series (+3). Last year, we accepted three more series: Open German Linguistics, Open Romance Linguistics, and Topics in Phonological Diversity.
Reviewing
The median time from submission to decision is now 97 days (-1). The median time from submission to publication was 257 days (-14).
The acceptance rate (counting desk rejections) is 53.75% (+1.51) over all series. Only considering submissions where the proposal had been previously approved, the acceptance rate is 88.71% (+1.75).
Downloads
In 2020, LangSci pdfs were downloaded 469,848 times (+106,865 compared to 362,983 in 2018), for a grand total of 1,149,905. This excludes downloads by search engine robots.
The most popular work is A aquisição da língua materna e não materna with 61,262 downloads, followed by Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (all three editions) with 60,659 downloads, and Grammatical theory (all four editions): 49,497 downloads.
Regional distribution
LangSci books have been accessed from 136 different countries and territories. The following chart gives a breakdown of the percentages of downloads per month for different areas of the world.
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, 236 linguists from all over the world have participated in proofreading. The most prolific proofreader is Jeroen van de Weijer, who has proofread chapters of 70 books.
There are currently 453 proofreaders registered with Language Science Press (+53).
For our 27 series, we are happy to be able to rely on 408 members in editorial boards from 49 different countries on 6 continents.
Paperhive
Of the books published in 2020, 27 went through proofreading on Paperhive. A total of 18,372 comments were left, for an average of 680 (median: 675). The book with the most comments was “Multi-verb constructions in Eastern Indonesia” (1355).
The total number of books which have completed proofreading on Paperhive is 103. Total number of comments over all books is 73,158 (mean: 710, median: 647)
CO₂
Due to the pandemic, we only travelled to one conference, 576km return. This was by train and emitted 0g CO₂. We are still unable to quantify our electricity and heating CO₂ footprint.
Finances
We had a revenue of 113,756.15 € (-18,951.76) in 2019 and expenditures of -120,676.92 € (+675.17). The main cost items are personnel (89,772.25 €), service providers (19,245.13 €), rent (5,752.10 €), book copies (3,825.57€), travel (1,244.21€), and gear (2,557.79€). A total of five different employees of four different nationalities have received a salary from Language Science Press (none of them full time, and only two of them 12 months).
Given that our expenditures remained stable at 120k, as did the number of books we published (30), we again arrive at a very round figure of 4000€ to produce one book (See here for an overview of costs elsewhere, ranging from 8k to 18k€).
The lion’s share of our revenue comes from institutional memberships via Knowledge Unlatched (105,000 €). 7,295,75 € come from print margins, the rest is diverse.
Note that none of theses figures includes VAT.
Achievements 2019
We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018). This is the fifth installment, for 2019.
Books and series
In 2019, we published 30 books:
78 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2019, for a total of 503. In 2017, 101 works had been proposed.
Running expressions of interest 2019
Achievements 2018
Achievements 2017
We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016 here). This is the third installment, for 2017.
Books and series
In 2017, we published 26 books:
99 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2017, for a total of 324. The curve is now slightly superlinear.
Book proposals over time. The linear fit is based on the interval between 2014-03-01 and 2017-12-31.
The following figure gives a breakdown of the distribution of these works and their states of completion.
Access statistics from OAPEN and OMP
OAPEN has recently sent us the access statistics for the last year. OAPEN is a repository for open access books. All our books are listed there, in addition to our OMP platform.
It is interesting to see in how far one or the other platform is used, and how the differences could be explained. The raw data are given below.
OMP pdf downloads 2016
| The future of dialects | 16137 |
| Grammatical theory | 7081 |
| New directions in corpus-based translation studies | 3798 |
| Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen | 2981 |
| The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology | 2546 |
| Natural causes of language | 2332 |
| The empirical base of linguistics | 2197 |
| Roots of language | 2066 |
| Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics | 1795 |
| Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen² | 1717 |
| Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition | 1431 |
| Thoughts on grammaticalization | 1397 |
| Adjective attribution | 1291 |
| The evolution of grounded spatial language | 1216 |
| A grammar of Yakkha | 1192 |
| Eyetracking and Applied Linguistics | 1125 |
| A grammar of Palula | 1057 |
| The Talking Heads experiment | 941 |
| Syntax und Valenz | 933 |
| The evolution of case grammar | 889 |
| Die Sprachwissenschaft | 836 |
| A grammar of Pite Saami | 763 |
| Language strategies for the domain of colour | 729 |
| How mobile robots can self-organise a vocabulary | 712 |
| A grammar of Mauwake | 651 |
| Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian | 605 |
| Grammaticalization in the North | 568 |
| A typology of marked-S languages | 501 |
Statistics 2015
2015 has been the first complete year for Language Science Press since the beginning of operations in early 2014. There is now enough data to run some analyses.
Works and series
Up and until 2015-12-31, 139 works have been proposed to
Language Science Press. the following figure gives a breakdown of the
distribution of these works and their states of completion.
Works with Language Science Press. The colour code is as follows: Black=expression of interest, light red=desk rejection; orange=waiting for submission; grey=under review red=rejected after review; light green=forthcoming; dark green=published.
Access stats for open access books.
Since we setup the new servers at CeDiS, we track our usage stats. In this blogpost, I will give some technical details, discuss some conceptual issues and finish with some mathematical remarks.
Technical details
We run Apache as a web server. The logs are analyzed and aggregated with awstats. Awstats also takes care of separating “real users/readers” from “machine readers” (bots). Including the bots would artificially inflate our reader numbers, so it is good to exclude them.
Cumulative downloads for all published books until 07/2105
In the past, we tracked access with a spreadsheet, but we now use an automated routine which parses the awstats output, aggregates access data per book and produces graphics for each book and then again for all books combined (using python, beautiful soup and matplotlib). Continue reading
Top LangSci book gets nearly 350 downloads a month
Gallery
This gallery contains 4 photos.
We have done an analysis of our log files. The following statistics show how often complete books were downloaded in the months of August and September. October will follow later. Crawlers were excluded. Breakdown by books Joshua Wilbur’s “A grammar … Continue reading