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Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>
yahoo.com>Dear linguists, I think the biggest obstacle to the replacement of traditional publications with e-journals is NOT a question of money (traditional publishers' financial interests) but one of academic monopoly: electronic publication will make it easier for authors to get published, and this will finally result in the liberalisation of the science; what people of high academic authority won't necessarily like. They'd prefer a slower process that makes publication of works an exclusive right. Even if authoritative e-journals happen to be still in the monopoly of a handful of academics, it will be still unsafe for people in power in our major linguistics departments as the very culture of using e-journals as the major publication tools will pave the way for avantegarde theorists to challenge established ideas . As printing industry liberalised the science of the time back in the middle ages, electronic publication of journals will have devestating effects on our dogmas today. Are we prepared for such a big step forward? Ahmad R. Lotfi English Dept. Azad University, IRAN.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
primus.ca>How sensible, and certainly not facile, are Andrew McIntyre's comments. So much research, data and information in a multitude of disciplines is freely available to anyone, even to people who do not own a personal computer. Why do we feel the need to have a "hard-copy" version of a journal article, which is essentially, either a work in progress or a statement of preliminary findings in the pursuit of a novel hypothesis? And why do we suppose that electronic versions would not undergo a rigorous peer review process? Jeanette IrelandMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ling.ohio-state.edu>I have a reaction to Martin Haspelmath's predictions and claims about open-access journals, from an editor's point of view (Studies in African Linguistics). It is important to distinguish the concepts "open access" and "electronic version". Prediction 1 has the disclaimer "This does not apply to books, of course, and these will remain important in linguistics". The logic of the argument applies equally to books and journals. The "goes out of fashion" argument doesn't go through as a way of distinguishing between journals and books (as Mike Maxwell points out). Verb paradigms of an underdescribed language do not change their worth depending on whether they are published in a journal or a book; trendy ideas that become theoretically irrelevant become irrelevant whether they are in a book or a journal. So I don't see any reason for treating books and journals differently, and I see the consequences of Martin's arguments, if his argument holds sway, being that print books also go by the wayside (though he doesn't propose that: it's an inevitable second consequence of the argument). I challenge prediction 1 and publically bet Martin that more than 50% of linguistics journals currently in print form will continue to exist as print journals in 10 years. I bet 100 Euros, and if you agree we can settle up in about a decade. You may be correct about P2, that articles not available online will become less influential, but I question the reason. I predict that more journals will become available online, so it follows that influential articles will become more likely to exist in an online form -- Language, Phonology, NLLT, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Linguistics and Lingua are all available online (and are not open access). Note that P2 is an argument about online format, not open access. I take P3, that there will be more open-access journals in the future, to be almost self-evidently true, but I dispute certain implications of the "reduced publication cost" claim. The cost of publication is not related to whether the journal is open-access, it is related to whether it is electronically available. The cost of publication can only go down if electronic access is the *only* form of access made available. Claim 1 is that open-access journals are in the interest of science because publisher's services are irrelevant to electronic publishing. This conflates "electronic" and "free. Someone has to physically produce the journal (even if it is just in PDF form -- please be sure that those phonetic characters are actually visible to *all* users always, and not just ones that have a certain font on their own machines); someone has to maintain the electronic version; someone has to disseminate the information that the journal exists and that there is a new issue. These are some of the services that the publisher provides, and they all cost money. Note that a *single* announcement of a journal's Table of Contents on the Linguist List costs $100 for any journal with subscription charges (Editor's Note: LINGUIST will make special arrangements if they seem merited.), and if there is no income for the journal, you cannot easily make known that you have a journal and that an issue is now available. While it is true that universities can, in principle, subsidize these costs, they are highly resistant to doing so because they are being asked to subsidize everything else under the sun. Regarding C2, that archiving electronic publications is not more difficult or expensive than archiving print journals, I don't know how to compare these apples and oranges. They both pose difficulties of a different type. In addition to the points raised by Karen Ward, archiving an electronic journal involves such messy things as servers, url's, and protocols for data representation. It is important, at least for some journals (I would hope all journals) that they not only be accessible now, but also in 40 years when url's have been replaced with something else, when PDF files are as outmoded as Postscript files, and when my department server (or whoever hosts the journal) has gone away forever. If the journal is hosted by one server and something catastrophic happens to the server, where do I go to get a copy of Smith's formerly online article on clitics? Is there a robust multi-national, multi-server free access system for hosting linguistics journals, with good backups? Not as far as I am aware. None of these problems are completely insurmountable; but archiving a print journal is pretty trivial. As to the question of abandoning traditional copyrighted journals in favor of rigorously peer-reviewed open-access journals, this introduces a further complication, namely copyright. Copyright still exists with open-access journals (it may reside with the author or it may reside with the journal -- that is a matter between the author and the journal). I think the question of intellectual property rights is sufficiently tangential that copyright should be taken off the table. While it might seem that the potentially unlimited capacity for new electronic journals is a good thing, there is a downside. First, if journals are to remain peer-reviewed, a proliferation of new journals will significantly increase demand on quality reviewers, who are already at a premium. Second, profession-external evaluation of journals is related to how scarce they are, so I have a counter-prediction that if electronic-only open access journals spread like wildfire, deans will assign little value to being an editor, will deny requests for release time for editors, and will be disinclined to provide support to yet another journal. I can just imagine a dean saying "Look, we already support 50 journals in this college which nobody reads, why should we put money into yours?". The financial consequences of traditional journal production provide a natural brake on the unconstrained expansion of journals, so if journals all become free, you will need to come up with alternative financing, alternatives to the traditional editor, and think of a way to maintain the system of peer-reviewing. Or, we could just move to a system of unrefereed blogging, but I don't see that as a good direction to go. Dave OddenMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue