Language Science Press BlogTo get an idea of the workflow of a manuscript in Language Science Press you can always read the manuals, but now you can also have a look at our brand new screencast. Other screencasts on single steps of the workflow will follow shortly.
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.
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.
This gallery contains 4 photos.
Introduction The review process of edited volumes is more complex than the review process of articles or books. The contributions to edited volumes are heterogeneous with regard to the quality of research and writing. The scientific merit of each contribution … Continue reading
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
The slides of our talk at Open Acces Tage 2015 in Zürich are available here (in German).
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.