Statistics 2015

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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.

distribution2015

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.

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LangSci T-shirts available

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We added a new item to our catalog: T-shirts with the LangSci logo. You can buy shirts in blue or black.

Our prices are solely based on production costs. We do not make any profit from selling these shirts.

5 books in 5 weeks

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In the last weeks, Language Science Press has had a sustained output of roughly one book a week. The books come from very different areas of linguistics, ranging from languages of New Guinea and Nepal to agent-based models and sociolinguistics in New Zealand. This shows that LangSci is indeed well rooted in linguistics at large. The books are, in order of appearance:

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Conversion of legacy documents and community publishing

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Language Science Press uses a Latex-based workflow. Authors can use our Word/OpenOffice templates as a start, but there are many manuscripts out there which predate the publication of our templates. In this blogpost, I will detail our principles of community-based publishing for one of these manuscripts.

Case study: A grammar of Mauwake

The Mauwake language is spoken in Papua New Guinea, along the North coast of  Madang province. Liisa Berghäll has worked there for over 25 years, and the  manuscript of her grammar was finalised around 2010. It was available from the University of Helsinki e-thesis service.

Re-publication of this work with Language Science Press as Open Access allows for a much broader readership, but of course the manuscript has to follow our guidelines. In order to arrive there, the following steps had to be undertaken

  1. convert the manuscript to *tex
  2. make sure the linguistic content is correct
  3. incorporate suggested changes
  4. proofreading
  5. incorporate proofreaders’ comments
  6. final typesetting

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Brussels workshop on Alternative Open Access Publishing Models

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We attended the workshop on Alternative Open Access Publishing Models organised by the European Commision (Directorate General Communications Networks, Content and Technology and Directorate General for Research and Innovation). This blogpost summarises our impressions.

The workshop

When we signed up, we were expected a small workshop with a lot of discussion. We were surprised to see about 100 people in the audience and a packed program with lots of information transfer from the speakers to the audience, but little room for interaction or discussion. The speakers were very well selected and gave a good overview of various approaches to OA publishing in Europe. It was at this meeting that I realised how diverse and vibrant the OA scene is in Europe.

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What’s the cost of an open access book?

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Proportional costs of a book

In order to establish a viable funding model for Open Access publications, one has to know the costs attached to creating an article or a book.

The sums quoted vary wildly, between 10 USD and 40,000 GBP for an article, and 1000 EUR and 25,000 EUR for a monograph.

In order to shed some light on the issue, we will share our data relating to the publication of monographs.

Calculating the costs: top-down

We are currently funded by the DFG with about 580k€ for a two year period. As a first approach, one could take the sum for one year, i.e. 290k€ and divide it by the number of publications, 9 to day. This leaves us with around 30k€ for a book. Continue reading →

Vancouver, August 2015: PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference

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vancouver-754242_1280

PKP – the Public Knowledge Project – is a non-profit research initiative that focuses on how publicly funded research can be made freely available through open access policies. One of PKP’s projects is Open Monograph Press (OMP), an open source software that let us set up our web site and back-office management swiftly and with only minimal costs. The 5th PKP conference took place from August 11-14 in Vancouver, Canada. Here are my impressions.

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Access stats for open access books.

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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 →