In case you’re not glued to social media 24/7, you may have missed some of the coverage of the Lingua → Glossa Affair.
Media coverage after the early Inside Higher Ed article has included:
- a statement of support of the Lingua team by Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities
- an article at Ars Technica, with some rather uninformed trolling in the comments
- an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
- an article in Wired
Yesterday, an Elsevier PR blog posted a mendacious “clarification”. In addition to some of the comments on that post, you can look in other places for the truth:
- Martin Eve, the founder of the Open Library of Humanities which will host the new incarnation of Lingua, has posted “Clarifying a few facts for Elsevier and their response to Lingua”
- Mike Taylor has posted a scathing reply to Elsevier
Elsevier claims that it founded Lingua, that it therefore has the right to the name, that the proposed open access charge of 400 Euros per article is not sustainable. Obviously, Lingua was founded by linguists not by Elsevier. The charge is almost certainly sustainable (in fact, Elsevier has journals that subsist on such a charge). And there are other lies in their statement. (By the way, the PR spokesman is the same person who made some rather revealing statements about women in STEM last year, as pointed out by Curt Rice, linguist and the president of Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.)
I stand by my call for community action: support the Glossa team, do not agree to help Elsevier stand up a sham Zombie Lingua.
To end with a quote from Mike Taylor:
You know what’s not sustainable? Dragging around the carcass of a legacy barrier-based publisher, with all its expensive paywalls, authentication systems, Shibboleth/Athens/Kerberos integration, lawyers, PR departments, spin-doctors, lobbyists, bribes to politicians, and of course 37.3% profit margins.
← Lingua → Glossa Lingua Disinformation →The biggest problem with legacy publishers? They’re just a waste of money.