There is exciting news from the open access revolution.
[Previously:] A few years ago, I put up some relevant short notes, focussing to some extent on Elsevier’s particularly egregious enmity towards open access: “Attach from big money publishers” and “News from the open access revolution”. Especially relevant is Elsevier’s rear-guard action against open access mandates such as MIT’s, discussed in an informative article by my former colleague Richard Holton. I also published my personal open access policy. In the mean time, the Elsevier Boycott started by our colleagues in mathematics has 15,286 signatories. The fully open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics that I co-founded with David Beaver is thriving and is now the second full journal of the Linguistic Society of America (alongside the flagship journal Language, which has a one year delayed open access policy).
This past month, our colleagues on the editorial team of the venerable journal Lingua proposed to the journal’s publisher Elsevier that Lingua should become a “fair open access journal”. It would charge reasonable, not excessive, article fees, which would be payed by a new consortium, with the result that the journal would be free to readers and authors. Not surprisingly, given Elsevier’s profiteering nature, Elsevier did not agree. In response, the entire editorial team resigned and will start a new open access journal with the same focus and scope as Lingua. Elsevier insisted that they have the rights to the name Lingua (even though the name has historic value and reputation that was created by linguists and not by a publishing company). So, the new journal will be called Glossa, but in the eyes of the community it is the rightful continuation of Lingua. Elsevier will try to start their own new journal, which they will name Lingua, usurping a name that has a lot of associated goodwill because of the hard work of the editors over decades. To me, that is a despicable insult to the linguistics community. A colleague suggested the alternative name “Zombie Lingua” for the Elsevier project, which I hope will stick.
There’s various hopes I have for the near future:
Finishing Lingua’s current business
The current editors of Lingua will finish up their current business over the next few months and will officially step down on December 31. I think the community should support them as best as possible, particularly by finishing any outstanding reviews. Any authors with work under submission to Lingua should strongly consider withdrawing these submissions and resubmitting them to Glossa as soon as that new journal is open for business (which is projected to be in January).
Supporting Glossa
Everyone should support Glossa: submit your best work to it, agree to review for it, help it get ranked and recognized across the academy.
Do not support Zombie Lingua
It won’t come as a surprise from a veteran Elsevier boycotter like me that I think that the community should not assist Elsevier in standing up a new journal that usurps the Lingua goodwill. Do not serve on the editorial team, do not submit articles, do not review for them. I certainly won’t.
I welcome discussion of my recommendations. For further information, there is a largely accurate article at Inside Higher Ed and there is the website of the Ling-OA initiative, which the Lingua/Glossa team is working with.
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