Future of Language Science Press: your support required as we are hitting the home stretch

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In spring this year, we launched our campaign to collect 100 institutional members to collectively fund the future of Language Science Press. The first pledge announced was from U Düsseldorf.

Since then, we have collected 60 pledges from all over the world, with U Tilburg being the latest, making it stand 60/100.

As customary with crowdfunding projects, the support rate is high at the beginning, then drops towards the middle of the funding period (summer in our case), only to rise steeply as the end of the funding period approaches. We see the pledges picking up steam in the last weeks, but we will need a much steeper rise to meet the target! The green X in the graphic marks the position where we are now.

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Workflow for edited volumes

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As of today, we have published 11 edited volumes. We have found that edited volumes demand much more work from all sides, and that the procedure for publishing edited volumes with Languages Science Press seems to cause more astonishment than the process for monographs. In this blog post, I will describe some differences in the setup between monographs and edited volumes and try to explicate in more detail what volume editors can expect. Remember that, technically, submissions have to be in LaTeX. We will offer assistance to the best of our capacities if you have chapters submitted in Word, but this depends on our current work load.

Difference between monographs and edited volumes

Monograph authors directly benefit from adherence to the guidelines. They are in direct contact with the coordinator and generally understand how particular technical subtleties impact their book when explained. Their efforts will directly translate into an improvement of a work which is 100% theirs, so normally, they are eager to comply. Furthermore, they are usually responsible for any delays themselves and hence try to minimise them. Continue reading →

Conversion of lexical databases into printable books

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We have recently published two dictionaries in our series African Language Grammars and Dictionaries which were automatically converted from the FLEX lexical database. These two books are The Ik language and A dictionary and grammatical outline of Chakali.

 

In this post, I will detail how structured lexical data as found in FLEX can be converted to *tex, which can be compiled into a LangSci book. I will complement this with some observations about conversions from the XLingPaper format.

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Document lifecycles and fluid publication

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Traditionally, once a book was published, there was little you could do to change its content afterwards. Works in linguistics which see a second edition are few and far between. The most you could hope for is a sheet of errata distributed with the book itself. One consequence of this was, incidentally, that many works were withheld for a long time to make sure they were absolutely perfect before releasing them to the printer’s, which would make the content immutable.

Errata. CC-BY-SA Sage Ross.

With electronic publication, things are different. The publication of a new version is comparatively cheap. In this blogpost, I will detail the lifecycle of a document at Language Science Press and show how we work together with PaperHive to get the document from the initial stage to the first (and subsequent) editions. At the end, I will put this approach into a wider perspective on academic publishing.

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Producing high quality maps for Open Access publications

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Linguistic books often include maps which give the location and surroundings of the varieties under investigation. As such, these maps provide very valuable background information about the setting. Unfortunately, very often the maps included in submissions we get cannot be printed. This has two reasons:

  1. we cannot print copyrighted maps. Most maps from other books are copyrighted and as such not usable by us, but also maps from the Internet (e.g. GoogleMaps or Ethnologue) are copyrighted.
  2. the map is in bad resolution. Screenshots are typically 72 dpi (dots per inch), but for good printing quality, we need 300 dpi, otherwise the picture looks blurry on paper (it may look OK on a screen though).

This blogpost is about creating simple maps which do not have either of these problems with the free software Inkscape. For an experienced user, this can be done within an hour or so; novices will need some more time.

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Future of Language Science Press

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Next to publishing 35 books over the last 3 years, we have also explored ways to finance open access. We identified 5 revenue streams, but our evaluation showed that the most promising one is a “library partnership model”, similar to crowdfunding. Instead of charging readers or authors, we think that small contributions from a wide network of linguistics libraries worldwide are a better solution for long-term sustainability and this is also more in line with the spirit of the linguistics community.

Our target in terms of book publications is 30/year.

For this, we have to collect 115,000 EUR.

Ways to support

Together with Knowledge Unlatched, we have set up the following ways to contribute towards meeting this sum:

We will approach libraries over the next months and propose our financing model to them. Libraries are much more likely to contribute if researchers have talked to their library about the advantages of Language Science Press before, so you can help us immensely by sending just a very brief email to your librarian. (See sample below).

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Access statistics from OAPEN and OMP

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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

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Achievements 2016

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We started our annual retrospectives last year. This is the retrospective for 2016

Books and series

Up and until 2015-12-31, 225 works have been proposed to Language Science Press (+86). The curve is very regular and nearly linear.

Book proposals over time

Book proposals over time

The following figure gives a breakdown of the distribution of these works and their states of completion.

Series submissions.

Series submissions.

The most active series are Studies in Diversity Linguistics (52), Textbooks in Language Sciences (25) and Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing (11).

There are currently 19 series (+2). Last year, we accepted EuroSLA Studies and Phraseology and Multiword Expressions.

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Open Review of “Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology”

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Language Science Press109 provides books as Open Access, but we also strive to make the whole publication process more open. Our software is open source, the Latex-code for all our books is openly available, and our bibliographies are on Glottolog.

One aspect of this openness is Open Review. The idea is that instead of two blind reviewers, the whole community can comment on a new manuscript and point out merits and possible improvements. A discussion of the theoretical axes along which Open Review can be differentiated can be found here; a report of practical experiences by Stefan Müller is here. At the time Stefan wrote his report, the technical infrastructure needed for doing Open Review was not fully in place yet, but now we are happy to announce that we will start Open Review as we intend it to be. Our first book to enter this Open Review stage is “Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology“.

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Community proofreading queue

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As of now, there have been 311 expressions of interest to publish with Language Science Press. In the beginning, the time between one book publication and the next was rather long, but now we have a number of parallel projects which requires some scheduling.

An important part of our workflow is community proofreading. We send out chapters of to-be-published books to community members interested in the topic. These community members then proof the chapter and return the corrections. Their contributions are listed in our Hall of Fame.

The proofreading phase is currently 4 weeks. But our output will be more than 1 book/month in the very near future. This means that we will have several books in proofreading at the same time. The following is a list of upcoming projects and the projected order in which they will reach proofreading. The order is basically first-come first-serve, i.e. when a books is ready, we send it out for proofreading. We might deviate from that in order to ensure a mix of books. For instance, we currently have 4 Africanist books. We add some other books in between to balance the topics.

The current queue is given below. Time between one book and the next should be two weeks:

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