Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: Free Sharing of Linguistic Research/Info |
| Submitter: | Martin Haspelmath |
| Description: | I fully share Don Killian's sentiments: Linguistics (especially world-wide
comparative linguistics) urgently needs better ways of aggregating its data, but while the technical limitations for sharing data are quickly disappearing, the social limitations are often still strong. But the solutions are known, it seems to me. Basically, there are two possibilities (for new material; I'm not discussing heritage material here, which is more complicated): (1) Open-access publication, and (2) archive dissemination, as practiced widely in physics and astronomy (e.g. arxiv.org). There is a movement toward both of these in linguistics (witness new open-access journals such as Linguistic Discovery or the e-Language journals, as well as archives such as ROA and Lingbuzz), but the movement is slow, and there is no real possibility for open-access publication of book-length material yet. Linguists generally still publish in restricted-access form because traditional journals and traditional books carry more prestige, and it's extremely difficult to bring about a shift in prestige. The more of the established linguists publish their work in open-access form, and the more innovative open-access publications we have, the more quickly will we see the change happening, but there's not much younger linguists can do at this point, I'm afraid. For descriptive material, however, it might be a good idea to create another archive, along the lines of ROA or LingBuzz, where authors can upload their grammars and dictionaries, or their descriptive articles. This is something that can probably be done with relatively few resources, and it could address one of the issues that Don Killian raises. (Personally, I don't find such archives for self-publication ideal, but they're much easier to create and maintain than new journals.) Martin Haspelmath To read the previous threads in this discussion, please visit: http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1001.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1050.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1053.html |
| Date Posted: | 25-Mar-2009 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 20.1060 |
| Posted: | 25-Mar-2009 |
