Language Log

First, a few words about the text, after which I will introduce the Sinologist who undertook this monumental philological task, Manfred W. Frühauf.

English:

The Mu Tianzi Zhuan, or Records of [King] Mu, the Son of Heaven, is con­sider­ed to be the ear­liest and longest ex­tant trav­e­logue in Chinese literature. It describes the jour­neys of King Mu (r. 976-922 BC or 956-918 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty (c.1046-256 BC) to the farthest corners of his realm and beyond in the 10th century BC. Harnessing his famous eight noble steeds he visits dis­tant clans and nations such as the Quanrong, Chiwu, and Jusou, exchanging gifts with all of them; he scales the awe-inspiring Kunlun mountains and meets with legendary Xiwangmu ("Queen Mother of the West"); he watches exotic animals, and he orders his men to mine huge quantities of precious jade for transport back to his cap­i­tal. The travelogue ends with a de­tailed account of the mourning ceremonies during the burial of a favorite lady of the king.

This is a guest post by Martin Haspelmath, building on our continuing coverage of Open Access in linguistics.

By now, everyone knows that scholarly publication is serious trouble. The actual costs of disseminating content have plummeted drastically, and yet academic institutions are paying more and more to the commercial publishers. This feels deeply wrong — as if Facebook charged us for posting cat videos. In some fields such as linguistics, there has been a lot of discontent for quite a while. Johan Rooryck's efforts to take the old "Lingua" away from Elsevier have been widely publicized, and Elsevier's handling of the situation, as well as the continuation of "Zombie Lingua", are regular talking points among linguists.

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel.]

Regular Language Log readers will be familiar with our continuing coverage of the goings-on at what we in the linguistics community have given the name Zombie Lingua — the Elsevier journal once universally known by its still-official name, Lingua — a journal that we believe should have been allowed to die a respectable death when its entire editorial board resigned en masse at the end of 2015 to start the new (and flourishing!) fair Open Access journal Glossa, published by Ubiquity Press.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrung my hands on Facebook over the proliferation of commercial publishers' Handbooks of Linguistics. These are usually priced out of individuals' budgets, being sold mostly to university libraries, and the thousands of hours of work poured into them by dedicated linguists are often lost behind a paywall, inaccessible to many of the people who would most like to read them.

That post prompted a flood of urgent discussion; it seemed like this was a thought that was being simultaneously had around the world. (Indeed, Kai von Fintel had posted the identical thought about six months prior; probably that butterfly was the ultimate cause of the veritable hurricane  that erupted on my feed.)

Long story short, a few weeks later we now have a proto-editorial board and are on to the next steps of identifying a venue and a business model for the series. Please check out our announcement below the fold, and follow along on our blog for updates as the series develops!

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel, cross-posted at Kai's blog.]

We have been following an ongoing story involving Zombie Lingua with great interest. For those unaware of it, and perhaps for those with only some awareness of it, here is what we currently know.

It will help to start by identifying the main characters in this story:

• Islam Youssef, Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University College of Southeast Norway,
• Zombie Lingua, the illegitimate continuation of the journal Lingua that Elsevier has propped up after Lingua's entire editorial team left to start the fair open access journal Glossa (in case you missed it, or need a refresher, see our first joint post with the story), and
• Bassil Mashaqba and Anas Huneety, both of the Department of English Language and Literature at The Hashemite University in Jordan (and both of whom received their PhD from the University of Salford).

OK, here we go.

Katie Fortney at the University of California (UC) Office of Scholarly Communication writes:

In November 2015, the editorial board of Lingua, a linguistics journal published by Elsevier, resigned en masse to begin a new open access journal, Glossa. […] Several UC linguistics faculty have now issued a statement declaring their support for the new journal and urging their colleagues and the UC libraries to no longer support Lingua. In response, the UC libraries have informed Elsevier that they wish to cancel their subscription to Lingua.
[…]
In making this statement of support for Glossa, the UC Linguistics faculty have joined their colleagues at institutions like the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and MIT; in addition MIT recently announced its support for Open Library of Humanities, which is supporting Glossa's move to its new home at Ubiquity Press.

This post follows up on "Lingua is dead, long live Glossa!" (11/8/2015), "Lingua Disinformation" (11/27/2015), and "Zombie Lingua Recruitment" (12/15/2015).

My sources say that Elsevier is now actively trying to recruit scholars for the editorial team of Zombie Lingua (see these Language Log posts for the background: "Lingua is dead. Long live Glossa!", Lingua Disinformation"). Here's a redacted sample of what they are sending to people:

Subject: Editorial Position Opportunity

Dear Professor […]

First please let me introduce myself as the […] at Elsevier responsible for the Social Science Journals, including our Linguistics portfolio.

I hope you do not mind me contacting you out of the blue like this, but as you may be aware we are currently looking for a new editorial team to head up the journal, Lingua. In discussions regarding this your name was suggested as a potential candidate to be part of this team. If this is something you would be interested in considering and would like to discuss this further, with no obligations, then please let me know. I would be more than happy to provide more details of the role and responsibilities.

Thank you for your time in considering this proposal. I look forward to your reply and hope to discuss this further with you in the near future.

Best regards […]

Needless to say, I'm hoping that the community is sufficiently immunized by now and that Elsevier will fail to attract linguists to stand up a zombie version of Lingua, which would not have any legitimacy as a successor to the journal's proud tradition. The true successor to Lingua is Glossa.

By the way: Glossa is now open for business. The first few submissions have already been made.

[This is a repost of an article on my personal blog. It continues the saga of the Lingua/Glossa Affair that Eric Bakovic and I wrote about here recently.]

Linguists today received a misleading email from Elsevier sent to everyone who has ever submitted to or reviewed for Lingua, the journal whose editorial board has decided to not work with Elsevier anymore and restart the journal as the open-access journal Glossa. Here is Elsevier’s email:

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel. Much of the content of this post is also found in Kai's posts on his own blog, semantics etc.: "Lingua → Glossa" (11/2/2015) and "Lingua Roundup" (11/5/2015).]

As many readers of Language Log know by now, the editors and the entire editorial board of a major linguistics journal, Lingua, have resigned en masse, effective when their contractual obligations to their soon-to-be-erstwhile publisher, Elsevier, are concluded at the end of this calendar year. This same editorial team will re-emerge in 2016 as the editors and editorial board of Glossa, a fair Open Access journal to be published by Ubiquity Press. You can read all about it, if you haven't already, from a variety of sources linked at the end of this post.

Two comments on the strange business of how we academics work for almost nothing doing our academic writing, and even do our own typesetting, and get our colleagues to do unpaid editing and quality reviewing of what we have written, so that publishers who have contributed almost no value added can then charge you readers huge sums of money for looking at the finished product. First, Stefan Müller in the preface to a new book he has just published in draft through the open-access organization Language Science Press (the emphasis in this quote is mine):

I started to work on my dissertation in 1994 and defended it in 1997. During the whole time the manuscript was available on my web page. After the defense I had to look for a publisher. I was quite happy to be accepted in the series Linguistische Arbeiten by Niemeyer, but at the same time I was shocked about the price, which was 186,00 DM for a paper back book that was written and typeset by me without any help by the publisher (twenty times the price of a paperback novel). This basically meant that my book was depublished: until 1998 it was available from my web page and after this it was available in libraries only.

The other comment you can see in its original habitat on Twitter at "Shit Academics Say":

Sometimes I look at the informed and insightful comments below Mark Liberman's technical posts here on Language Log, and I find myself thinking: These people are smart, and their wisdom enhances the value of our site. Maybe I should return to opening up comments on my posts too. But then something awful happens to convince me never to click the Allow Comments button again, unless at gunpoint. Something awful like the comments below Tom Chivers' article about me in the The Daily Telegraph, a quality UK newspaper of broadly Conservative persuasion (see their Sunday magazine Seven, 16 March 2014, 16–17; the article is regrettably headlined "Are grammar Nazis ruining the English language?" online, but the print version has "Do these words drive you crazy"—neither captures anything about the content).

I unwisely scrolled down too far and saw a few of the comments. There were already way more than 1,300 of them. It was like glimpsing a drunken brawl in the alley behind the worst bar in the worst city you ever visited. Discussion seemed to be dominated by an army of nutballs who often hadn't read the article. They seemed to want (i) a platform from which to assert some pre-formed opinion about grammar, or (ii) a chance to insult someone who had been the subject of an article, or (iii) an opportunity to publicly beat up another commenter. I didn't read many of the comments, but I saw that one charged me with spawning a cult, and claimed that I am the leader of an organization comparable to the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung who aided Hitler's rise to power:

Pullum is not so much the problem; he's just an ivory tower academic whose opinions are largely irrelevant to the average person. The problem is the cult following he has spawned. I don't know if he condones the thuggish tactics his Brownshirts regularly employ against the infidels, but it is certainly disturbing.

Today marks the beginning of Open Access Week, and last week's announcement about changes to the Linguistic Society of America's publications program was like an early OA Week present. Some highlights:

• All content published in Language will be made freely available on the new LSA website after a one-year embargo period.
• Authors who wish to have their content available immediately, either on the Language site or on other websites, may pay a $400 article processing fee to do so.
• The contents of Language will continue to be immediately available to LSA members and to other subscribers of Project MUSE.

Information about more Open Access goodness to come at the LSA's Annual Meeting in January here.

The 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is scheduled to be held in Boston, January 3-6, 2013. As it happens, the 128th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association will also be held in Boston on the same dates. The LSA and MLA have planned a number of joint activities for meeting attendees.

The LSA's Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals (CELxJ) will sponsor an organized session on Open Access publishing, to be held at the LSA on Thursday, January 3, 4-7pm. In addition to yours truly, our confirmed panelists include:

• Ellen Duranceau (MIT Libraries Program Manager for Scholarly Publishing and Licensing)
• Kai von Fintel (MIT Linguistics, founding co-editor of Semantics & Pragmatics)
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA Director of Scholarly Communications)
• Alyson Reed (Executive Director of the LSA)
• Stuart Shieber (Harvard Computer Science, Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication)
• Lindsay Whaley (Dartmouth Linguistics, founding co-editor of Linguistic Discovery)
• Vika Zafrin (Boston University Institutional Repository Librarian)

I hope that anyone planning to attend the LSA or the MLA will make time to attend this important and timely session. Building on its efforts with eLanguage, the LSA has recently committed to extend the range of the journal Language to include online-only, Open Access material; a business model for supporting Open Access publications is currently under consideration and will be available before the panel meets. The MLA Convention's Presidential Theme is Avenues of Access, including Open Access and the future of scholarly communication. The efforts on the part of both of these organizations to increase public access to scholarly work will be among the topics under discussion in this session.

Check this space soon for more/updated information. [ Update, 10/2/2012 — abstracts for the session are now posted. ]