The MIT Library News blog reports on my personal policy declaration.

Benjamin Russell recently finished his dissertation at Brown. I was part of his committee (chaired by Polly Jacobson, other members: Larry Horn, Laura Kertz) and learned a lot from working with Ben. He has now posted his thesis to the archive:

• Russell, Benjamin. 2012. Probabilistic reasoning and the computation of scalar implicatures. Providence, RI: Brown University PhD dissertation. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WY1YTRhM/russell2012probabilistic.pdf.

Anybody interested in the formalization and understanding of pragmatic mechanisms should read this thesis.

Speaking of open access, I hope that most of you have heard about the US Research Works Act, which is a bill before Congress that would roll back the open access policies of some federal grant agencies. I urge you all to do what you can to raise awareness of this. Here is some essential reading:

• An opinion piece in the Guardian: “Academic publishers have become the enemies of science: The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls”.
• An editorial by Michael Eisen in the NYT: “Research Bought, Then Paid For”.
• Related posts on Eisen’s blog:
  • “Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research”,
  • “Plagiarist or Puppet? US Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s reprehensible defense of Elsevier’s Research Works Act”.
• Some notes on the act from Peter Suber, especially on growing dissent from academic publishers that are members of the Association of American Publishers, which has endorsed the bill.
• Peter Suber’s postings on Google+ are a convenient way to follow the issue.

My position on this is exactly the one very forcefully put by Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber:

“We endorse the view that every federal agency funding non-classified research should require free online access to the full-text, peer-reviewed results of that research as soon as possible after its publication. There are three powerful reasons to take such a step. First, taxpayers deserve access to the results of taxpayer-funded research. It is their right. Second, public access maximizes the visibility and usefulness of this research, which in turn maximizes the return on the public’s enormous investment in that research. Third, public access accelerates research and all the benefits that depend on research, from public health to economic development, manufacturing, and jobs …”

[From: http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012]

Update (2012-01-18): Good news. Two of the big guns, Nature and Science have come out in opposition to the Research Works Act and in support of the NIH Open Access Policy. It’s very clear that Elsevier and their cronies are isolated in the scientific community, but unfortunately they have the ears of many ill-informed congresspeople.

MIT, of course, has an Open Access Policy, which I am proud to have played a small role in establishing. Having that policy has guided my personal decisions about venues for publishing and reviewing, but I have noticed that I have not always been very principled and consistent in my decisions. So, it is time for my own personal policy. Here it is.

Kai’s Open Access Policy

1. Journals: I will only publish in, review for, and serve on editorial boards for journals that allow authors to deposit at least the final manuscript version (“postprint”) in an open access repository (such as MIT’s Dspace or the Semantics Archive), without any embargo (such as having to wait for 24 months before making the OA version available).

2. Book chapters: I will personally only contribute book chapters, if the publisher allows me to deposit at least the final manuscript version in an open access repository, without any embargo. (I will consider reviewing books or book chapters that are not OA-friendly, because books are a different business from research journals, although I wish that there was more movement towards OA books.)

3. Books: I will only publish books myself that have a significant open access component, such as making at least the final manuscript freely available, or even the final published version while charging for print versions of course.

For current reference, here are the policies of leading publishers of relevance to our field(s), culled from the MIT Libraries list of publisher policies:

• Elsevier: With 2011 revision of author agreement, requires authors to opt out.
• MIT Press: In full cooperation. Allows posting of final published version.
• Springer: MIT and Springer have established an agreement that extends flexible reuse rights to MIT authors of papers published in Springer journals. Among other rights, the final submitted manuscripts of MIT-authored Springer papers can be posted openly in MIT’s open access repository DSpace@MIT. Authors should sign the standard Springer agreement and do not need to submit an author’s addendum.
• Wiley-Blackwell: Has indicated it will be requiring authors to opt out.

Obviously, this list doesn’t include some important publishers, such as Oxford University Press. So, before making any particular decisions, I will consult with whoever is asking me to publish or review for them.

I am migrating this site back from commercial blog hosting at wordpress.com to a self-hosted solution, reversing my goodbye to DIY. I am however not running a CMS like Wordpress on the server anymore, because that has opened me up to spam attacks in the past, which is why I moved away from self-hosting last year. So, now, I’m writing my posts on my computer, “baking” the site through Jekyll/Octopress, and then uploading a static website to the server.

I like the fact that all my posts are right here (in plain text, markdown format) and do not reside in some server database. I’m having fun geeking out around this move, learning a bit more Ruby along the way. This is certainly not something I would recommend unless you’re really into this kind of thing. Hosting your blog at wordpress.com is a very good option if you don’t want to worry about what happens on the back end.

One thing that I didn’t like and that got me to move away from there is this: the annual renewal of the “No-Ads” option (for $30 or so) came up, but then I noticed (using the Ghostery chrome extension) that wordpress.com tracks all readers with two commercial systems: the ScoreCard Research Beacon and Quantcast, in addition to their own stats system. One might have hoped that by purchasing the no-ads option, one’s readers would enjoy not just an ad-free blog but also one that doesn’t track their behavior.

Anyway, the site now is definitely a bit no frills, which I kind of like. There’s no comment system, for example (some Jekyll/Octopress sites use the Disqus system, but turns out they also do a massive amount of user tracking). If you have feedback on anything, email me or tweet about it or write on your own blog. If it makes sense, I will update my post accordingly. In the sidebar are just a few things: links to other sites I’m involve with, my latest tweets (in addition to a page that has all my tweets ever, fwiw), and my latest pinboard bookmarks. The RSS feeds should work as before once things are settled down after the move.

I have restored most of the old posts all the way back to 2003 when I started this blog. There are all kinds of formatting errors and of course lots of linkrot, but maybe I’ll get around to fixing all that over time.

I have a new draft paper:

The best we can (expect to) get? Challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals.
2012. Paper to be presented in a session on Deontic Modals at the Central APA, February 17, 2012.

A somewhat programmatic response to recent challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals (as brought into linguistics by Kratzer), addressing work by Cariani, Cariani & Kaufmann & Kaufmann, Charlow, Kolodny & MacFarlane, Lassiter, Silk.

As always, comments would be very welcome. You know how to reach me.

Iatridou & Zeijlstra: “Negation, polarity and deontic modals”.

[cross-posted from S&P: Editors’ Blog]

Time for a year-end statistical rundown on how S&P is faring.

In 2011, we published 5 main articles and 3 short articles for a total of 331 pages.

The submission rate has almost doubled since 2010. We are very lucky to now have 6 associated editors working hard alongside David and Kai. We received 43 new submissions in 2011, of which we published 5 (three of the articles published in 2011 were originally submitted in 2010) and accepted 6 more (those are in various stages of revision or typesetting). We declined 24 submissions (6 of those were declined without external review, usually within a day or so). For the 29 submissions that were sent out for review and have already been decided on, the average time to the decision was 48 days (our goal is 60 days, which we missed in only a few cases). 8 submissions are still under review.

Our acceptance rate for this year’s submissions was 11/35 = 31% (to be updated when the rest of the submissions have been decided on).

Our articles are each downloaded well over 1000 times per year. Our most downloaded article is Matthewson 2010, which has been downloaded more than 12,000 times so far. By now, some of our articles are building up a good citation rate on Google Scholar. As of 2011, S&P is also indexed in the influential MLA International Bibliography. We will continue to work on having S&P be indexed and ranked by all relevant providers.

All years

2007: 4 submissions, all declined, avg decision: 37 days, acceptance rate: 0%

2008: 16 submissions, 5 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 31%

2009: 21 submissions, 6 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 29%

2010: 25 submissions, 3 published, 1 accepted, avg decision: 58 days, acceptance rate: 16%

2011: 43 submissions, 5 published, 6 accepted, 8 under review, avg decision: 48 days, acceptance rate: 31%

[NB: these stats do not include commentaries or other articles that were not subject to standard external peer review but were solicited by the editors and received expedited editorial review. S&P has published 6 invited commentaries and is about to publish its first “underground classic”. Also NB: one submission from 2010 is still in revision cycle; 2011 stats not final until all decisions made]

Downloads (not including invited commentaries)

as of 12/28/2011:

Matthewson 2010: 12,233 downloads of the pdf of the article
Schlenker 2009: 5,342
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 5,119
Chemla 2009: 4,723
Beck 2010: 4,688
Barker & Shan 2008: 4,318
Nouwen 2010: 3,960
De Swart & Farkas 2010: 3,923
Gillies 2010: 2,513
McCready 2010: 2,604
Barker 2010: 1,827
Franke 2011: 1,779
Rothschild 2011: 1,253
Rothschild & Klinedinst 2011: 698
Abrusán 2011: 681
Khoo 2011: 539
Magri 2011: 287
McClure 2011: 87
Bary & Haug 2011: 63

Google Scholar citation counts

as of 12/29/2011 (links go to Scholar citations):

Schlenker 2009: 42
Barker & Shan 2008: 30
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 28
Chemla 2009: 22
Nouwen 2010: 16
Gillies 2010: 15
Beck 2010: 10
Farkas & DeSwart 2010: 7

A subset of the MIT syntax/semantics politburo, some of us even smiling:

(Taken during Rick Nouwen’s colloquium when Irene Heim was introducing the speaker, which is why she’s not in the row with us.) (Thanks to Danny Fox for the pointer at the picture and thanks to mitcho for taking the picture!) (Can you put three parentheticals in brackets in a row?) (Sure, you can.)

I’ve already shared this picture via the requisite social networks, but here it is for the blog:

A picture taken after Noam Chomsky’s keynote talk at Ling50@MIT, the scientific reunion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the MIT Linguistics phd program. Morris and Noam are holding a 1988 picture of them holding a 1953 picture of them … Or, as Bob Frank put it: “The linguists the colleagues the department invited applauded posed for a picture.”