Discussion Details
| Title: | Free Sharing of Linguistic Research/Information |
| Submitter: | Don Killian |
| Description: | Dear Linguists,
I have no doubts on morphology, phonology, grammar, or any such subfield of linguistics that I'd like to ask about today. Rather, it's about ethics within our field, and I'm questioning the validity of certain practices. I'd love any advice you could give on suggestions to help change this way of thinking. I've been working with typological linguistics for a while now. In order to do good comparative work, you need to obtain a fairly large amount of source material. Unfortunately, I've run into problems regarding accessing that information. While I've met many wonderful people who are very open with sharing their information, it is sometimes difficult to gain access to unpublished dissertations/theses, or to articles appearing in journals that charge unreasonable subscription or single access fees. Some others have been less willing to distribute their information. It causes a lot of people a lot more work to try and hunt down and obtain information, often at great costs in time and money. It doesn't help anyone, and it hinders a lot. A lot of good researchers are prevented from contributing meaningful material to our field. The more we spread information about linguistics, the more people can learn and investigate new areas. If it's a matter of investing time and effort, I know a lot of students, researchers, and professors, particularly here in Nordic Europe, who are very much in favor of the idea of freely available information, and would put in a lot of effort to make a database happen. I myself would be willing to head some sort of cross-linguistic project to get a server with a large amount of primary material available. While I'm open to anyone wishing to participate in the project, the most important thing would be for people to be willing to distribute their research. I am not looking for an open source project akin to Wikipedia, and I want to make sure people are credited for their research. But at the moment, financial considerations and copyright issues are preventing better research from taking place. I'd like to see that change, particularly in this day and age, where information is much more freely available, and publishing costs are not as big a concern. I welcome any opinions. Best Regards, Don Killian |
| Date Posted: | 21-Mar-2009 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 20.1001 |
| Posted: | 21-Mar-2009 |
