2700+ book downloads in two weeks: Interview with Roland Schäfer

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Roland Schäfer

Roland, congratulations to your text book Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen which got more than 2,700 downloads within the two weeks following publication and now leads the list of our most downloaded books.

Thanks a lot for publishing the book.

What is your textbook about? Are there not enough introductory textbooks around?

The book is about the basic facts of German grammar: surely not everything, but a large portion of what students of German linguistics should know about German grammar. At the same time, it introduces students to the standard methods used by linguists (at least traditionally) to dissect a language, i.e., mostly distributional analyses in phonology, morphology, syntax, and graphemics. No matter which theories or methods you’re going to use later, it’s hard to get by without knowing your basic categories…

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Axes of Open Review

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At Language Science Press, we are experimenting with Open Review. While investigating how we could implement an Open Review system, we discovered that there are actually very different things which could be called Open Review, and even in a small team, opinions differ as to what is the real thing.

 

Axes

We have established the following dimensions:

open not open
Selection process anyone can comment a restricted class of people can comment
Transparency the names of the reviewers are revealed the names of the reviewers remain anonymous
Online the reviews are created on the Internet the reviews are created offline (e.g. pdf comments in a file)

The  following criteria do not apply to openness, but are nevertheless relevant:

Time final publication will incorporate comments publication is finished before commenting is open
Relevance comments have an influence on the acceptance comments exist next to a different process of quality assurance
Scope comments are local, paragraph level at the maximum global comments, appreciation of the whole work

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New book: The Talking Heads experiment: Origins of words and meanings

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Steels2015We are happy to announce the first book in the series Computational Models of Language Evolution “The Talking Heads experiment: Origins of words and meanings” by Luc Steels.

The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. Continue reading →

New features on our website

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We have updated our website and are happy to announce a couple of new features:

Hall of Fame and Public Profiles

The Hall of Fame now shows links to public profiles of the users. To view the profiles you have to be logged in. The profile shows the institution and website you added  to your profile, as well as the bio statement you provided. Additionally, the public profile shows a person’s achievements supporting Language Science Press as author, proofreader or typesetter. The published monographs a user has worked on are listed here.

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New book: Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen

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CoverWe are happy to announce the first book in the series Textbooks in Language Sciences: “Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen” by Roland Schäfer.

This textbook is an introduction to the descriptive grammar of German on the levels of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and graphemics. It is a recommended read for anyone interested in the grammar of German and especially for students of German philology. The book focuses on how grammatical generalizations are derived from concrete linguistic material while covering a huge number of the important phenomena of German grammar. No specific theoretical framework is adopted in the book but it constitutes an ideal starting point for reading more theory-specific textbooks and accessible research papers. Despite its length, the book is suitable for inclusion in all sorts of curricula because more advanced parts are clearly marked and can be skipped, and the five parts of the book can be read separately. Almost all chapters contain a large number of exercises with complete solutions in the appendix.

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Quality assurance and open review

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While many of the things that we envisaged in the DFG proposal (Müller & Haspelmath 2013) are up and running already, one important thing is still missing: open reviewing. As was already argued by Pullum (1984), open review increases the quality of publications because reviewers will have to do their job carefully, as it is their reputation that will suffer if their name is associated with a bad publication. In addition, Pullum pointed out that reviews may improve a publication quite substantially and in a closed reviewing scenario the reviewers contribution cannot be acknowledged as it should be.

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Screencast “How to submit a manuscript”

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In order to make the submission of manuscripts easier for authors, we have created a screencast.

You can also find the screencast on our website. More screencasts will follow soon. They will explain the general workflow within Language Science Press; the review process; LaTeX editing; etc. If you have particular wishes or other ideas, let us know in the comments.