Language Science Press

Language Science Press is an open access scholarly publishing house specializing in linguistics. This publishing house was formally set up in 2014, in a context of perceived overcharging by traditional publishing houses.[1]

“Writing books, reviewing books for publishers, and copying them afterwards takes a lot of time. This time is usually paid for by state institutions or funding agencies. The publishers do not pay for it. On the contrary, some even require money from the authors to keep the book prices low (...). When libraries buy our books, the state pays a second time.”[2]

Language Science Press
Founded2013 (2013)
Country of originGermany
Headquarters locationBerlin
DistributionThe main means of distribution is electronic
Key peopleMartin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) and Stefan Müller (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Revenuenot-for-profit publisher
Official websitehttp://langsci-press.org/

Language Science Press publishes books on a central storage and archiving server in combination with print on demand services.[3][4] Language Science Press uses the Creative Commons CC-BY license as a standard. As of January 2021, 171 books had been published.

History

Language Science Press goes back to the Open Access in Linguistics (OALI) initiative,[5] which was started by Stefan Müller and colleagues at the Free University of Berlin in August 2012. In its preliminary stages, the initiative consisted in finding a supporters’ base within the global linguistics community, which was achieved thanks to the initiative’s resonance with many of its members

In a second phase, a grant proposal was jointly submitted by Martin Haspelmath and Stefan Müller for the call “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities”.[6] Funding came then from the German Research Foundation for the development of a full-fledged business model and its realization (Language Science Press) starting June 2014.

Publication process

Every book published via Language Science Press goes through a predefined workflow[7] that relies in part on a community of voluntary proofreaders. There are in total five stages:

  1. Submission: A first draft of the manuscript is submitted by the author(s) to the respective series’s editor(s).
  2. Review: Two reviewers are chosen by the respective series’s editor for peer review.
  3. Proofreading: Community proofreaders inspect the revised manuscript.
  4. Typesetting: A final typographic check is carried out by Language Science Press.
  5. Publication: The now complete book is published and made freely available according to the principles of open access.

Open commentaries and reviews and community proofreading are made possible by PaperHive.[8][9] Since at least September 2020, Language Science Press has also been using docLoop,[10][11] which allows for the community feedback to be turned into issues on GitHub.

Setup

Language Science Press is organized in series. As of January 2021, there are 25 such series.

  • Studies in Diversity Linguistics
  • Textbooks in Language Sciences
  • Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing
  • Classics in Linguistics
  • Computational Models of Language Evolution
  • Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax
  • Studies in Laboratory Phonology
  • African Language Grammars and Dictionaries
  • Contemporary African Linguistics
  • Morphological Investigations
  • Conceptual Foundations of Language Science
  • Language Variation
  • Open Generative Syntax
  • Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface
  • EuroSLA Studies
  • Implemented Grammars
  • Niger-Congo Comparative Studies
  • Open Slavic Linguistics
  • Phraseology and Multiword Expressions
  • Studies in Caribbean Languages
  • Contact and Multilingualism
  • History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences
  • Languages of the Caucasus
  • Current Issues in Bilingualism
  • Topics in Phonological Diversity

The publisher's Advisory Board decides upon series proposals. Authors submit their manuscripts to a specific series. The publisher's website states that each manuscript is reviewed by at least two reviewers determined by the series editors.[12]

The source code of books is available from a GitHub repository.[13]

Partnerships

Language Science Press has a partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, a global library consortium approach to funding open access books.

The publishing house maintains a list of supporters shown online.[14] Notable supporters include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.

Digital typography

In order to facilitate the typesetting of manuscripts in linguistics and hence the overall publishing process, Language Science Press has also been developing packages for . For example, langsci-avm provides a specialized syntax for typesetting potentially complex attribute-value matrices (AVMs).[15][16]

See also

References
  1. Müller, Stefan. 2012. A personal note on Open Access in linguistics. Journal of Language Modelling 0(1). 9–39.
  2. "Motivation". Language Science Press. Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  3. "Language Science Press: von der Idee zur Umsetzung in drei Jahren". Community und Geschäftsmodell für Open Access Monografien, Stefan Müller, Sebastian Nordhoff, Debora Siller, 8. Januar 2016, FU Berlin
  4. "Information on purchasing hard copies of Language Science Press books". Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  5. Müller, Stefan. 2012. A personal note on Open Access in linguistics. Journal of Language Modelling 0(1). 9–39.
  6. Nordhoff, Sebastian. 2018 Language Science Press business model. Electronic resource, 7-8. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  7. Workflow of a manuscript. Retrieved 2021-01-26
  8. Document lifecycles and fluid publication. Retrieved 2021-01-26.
  9. Official website of PaperHive. Retrieved 2021-01-26.
  10. Collecting reader feedback with PaperHive, docLoop and GitHub. Retrieved 2021-01-26
  11. Official website of docLoop. Retrieved 2021-01-26
  12. "'Setup' section of the publisher's website". Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  13. Public repository of Language Science Press
  14. LangSci Supporters
  15. langsci-avm on CTAN
  16. Writing AVMs easily in LaTeX: The new langsci-avm package. Blogpost. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
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