Stuart Shieber on Economy

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Stefan Müller

Interesting Post by Stuart Shieber about bundels and other nice tricks.

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Books I Did not Buy

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Stefan Müller

In this post I will document books I wanted to buy but did not because the math did not work out.

  1. Mikkelsen, Line, 2005, Copular Clauses: Specification, Predication and Equation, Benjamins, 210 pages, US $158/105€ ($0,75/0,50€ per page), 15.12.2012.
  2. Lyih-Peir Luo, 1999,  Studien zu seriellen Verbkonstruktionen: Ihre Syntax und Semantik im Chinesischen, De Gruyter, 204 pages, US$ 196.00/139.95€ ($0,96/0,70€ per page), 20.12.2012.
  3. Lee-Schoenfeld, Vera, 2007, Beyond Coherence: The Syntax of Opacity in German, Benjamins, 206 pages, $158/105€ ($0,77/0,51€ per page), 04.01.2013.

This page relates to the post about The Cost of Knowledge and its purpose is also to collect publishers with outrageous book prices.

 

PS: For the authors: I will read the book nevertheless, if they are available in the libraries in Berlin or via interlibrary loan. I will not ask our library to buy these books. If no library that is connected to the FU library offers the books or if they are not available, I will not read them …

 

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Summary of the Kickoff Meeting for OALI at the FU

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Stefan Müller

The kickoff meeting of the OALI initiative took place on Monday 29th of October at the Freie Universität in Berlin. The participants were Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig), Gereon Müller (Universität Leipzig), Felix Bildhauer (FU Berlin), Matthias Hüning (FU Berlin),  Janna Lipenkova (FU Berlin), Judith Meinschäfer (FU Berlin), Roland Schäfer (FU Berlin), Horst Simon (FU Berlin), Ferdinand von Mengden (FU Berlin). Katja Mruck from the Center of Digital Systems (CeDiS, FU Berlin) was also present as a guest. Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Warsaw), Andrea Schalley (Griffith University, Brisbane), Joseph T. Farquharson (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine), and Sebastian Nordhoff (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) took part via Skype.

I first gave a presentation introducing the issue and mentioning some questions that should be discussed and decided.

The General Setup

We decided that it is best to attach the initative to a university or other research institution. I will explore the options at the FU Berlin. After the meeting Martin Haspelmath suggested that attaching the initiative to the MPI in Leipzig may also be an option. We will explore these possibilities as quickly as possible.

We discussed founding a Verein (Association) since this would allow us to accept donations. The downside is that you have to have annual meetings where the six members of the board are present. A German Verein seems to be inappropriate  for our international enterprise. We decided to try without this additional structure. I found out today that it is possible to get donations to a research project at the FU. I will explore this option further.

There will be series editors that are responsible for certain subparts of linguistics. One series will be established that covers all publications that do not fit the descriptions of the other series.

Series proposals and editors are judged by an advisory board that will be established in the near future.

Series in other languages than English will be possible.

Advantages of the New Publishing Format

It was agreed in the discussion that the advantages of the new way to publish should be emphasized. They are:

  • Speed
  • Version control
  • Visibility
  • Connection to the primary data and software

The new way of publishing allows scenarios that differ from what we know so far. Authors can make drafts of their book available to the community as soon as there is something to show. Some authors do this and did this in the past, but publishers frowned about this and some refused to publish books that were in the net. The initial submission could be stored together with reviews and with improved versions of the document (Wikipedia like). This guarantees that the earliest moment in which a certain idea was present is documented. It also opens up new possibilities of quality improvement. Readers alert authors of mistakes and typos in a phase after acceptance and before finalization.

The documents are accessible by all search engines not just by those that are run by companies that happen to have a contract with the publisher.

The publications can be stored together with primary data and software. (Some) publishers are setting up this infrastructure now and some authors already did this on their own, but there are entirely new possibilities as demonstrated by the projects of Enhanced Digital Publication. Check out their videos.

The Cost of Knowledge 2

Anke Lüdeling asked about the list of supporters which mainly contains the names of established researchers and has some elite flavour. As you can see in this post (and also on the OALI web page in the reviewers lists) I omit titles. I think they are not important here. In the list of supporters they are important since the point is to show both insiders and outsiders that well-established researchers think OALI is worth being supported. The OALI group on academia was set up in order to make it possible for everybody to subscribe, but I guess there are more supporters than linguists who registered with academia. I originally planned to make the whole thing more open by setting up something like  thecostofknowledge for linguistics with connection to OALI. However, it was decided that we should rather concentrate on establishing series and getting publications out. Those who want to declare their sympathy to the proposals can do this by leaving posts or comments in the blog and by joining the OALI mailing list. This is even more support than signing a petition since you have to delete some emails from time to time =;-).

Of course if somebody wants to set up something like  thecostofknowledge for linguistics independent of OALI, I would be interested to see the numbers.

LaTeX vs. MicroSoft Word

There was also a discussion of whether it would be possible to make LaTeX submission obligatory, but help Word and Libre Office users to find somebody who does the conversion, if they want to. The LaTeX users convinced me that Word submissions have to be accepted, but it was also pointed out that having to deal with Word submissions does increase the costs for the publishing organization. So, here is a first thing that everybody who is interested in OA publishing can do: Learn LaTeX. I gave a course about LaTeX for Linguists some years ago. The handouts are in German and a bit outdated (tree-package, fonts, …), but I will work on this as soon as I find time. There will be another post on this topic soon.

Interestingly a Word user remarked after the meeting that she wanted to switch and said: Everybody who tried to do a book in Word will agree that one should try professional alternatives.

 

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The prestige of the publisher’s brand name – an underestimated factor in science book publication costs

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Martin Haspelmath

Complaining about high publication costs in science has become commonplace, but why is it that scientists are not choosing cheaper publication venues? As Christoph Bruch remarked recently, it seems that “scientists depend on publishers like junkies depend on their dealers”.

This has to do with prestige, a factor that is hard to describe and even harder to measure. But it is very powerful. Free access to our work is not the only thing we need to disseminate our research results. Continue reading →

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The Cost of Knowledge

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Stefan Müller

As mentioned in my description of the OA event at the HU, I was impressed by what the mathematicians achieved. I went to thecostofknowledge.com and wanted to sign their protest against Elsevier. There are three options one can check: I refrain from publishing, refereing, editorial work.

Editorial Work, Reviewing, Publishing

I thought about how this would affect my everyday scientific life. I do not do any editorial work for Elsevier, but I am on an editorial board for Springer and de Gruyter, who aren’t any better (see below). For Springer, I am on the editorial board of The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. I am in this editorial board as someone working in a minority framework (HPSG). I always thought that it is good to be in there since this may encourage people to submit to the journal and journal submissions are very important for a small subcommunity to increase outside visibility. Could I quit? Probably yes.

I also plan to submit an article to this journal, since it has exactly the right profile for what I am doing and I do not know any comparable journal. What should I do? A lot of us publish exclusively in the HPSG proceedings, but although this publication has an ISSN number and is freely available, it is hardly ever read. You may look at my Google Scholar profile to get an idea of what is cited and what is not. One could say: OK, you submitted the good papers to journals, but this is not quite true for all the papers there. (If you grant me the ability to judge my own work …). So, I will submit some of the proceedings papers to journals and one would go to the JCGL. Do I want to refrain from this? No. Well, maybe after two months of further thinking …

The journal Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft that is currently published by de Gruyter is a special case, that will be discussed below.

This leaves us with refereeing. I do a lot of review work (I think it is a lot. Are there statistics?) I changed the part of my homepage about reviewing so that it is clear how many articles I review per year. What would happen if I stopped? This would mainly affect Lingua, JCGL, and the de Gruyter journal Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. As Martin Grötschel said in this OA panel discussion, researchers like to have influence on their field. So is it vanity? What would happen if I quit? I somehow feel that I have the duty to review. As a service to the field. One aspect that is important to me is again the issues of minority frameworks. Chomskyan linguistics is dominant in theoretical syntax and often work in other frameworks is not cited. So one of my tasks of a reviewer is to point authors to papers that they did not read or have choosen to ignore. Do I want to refrain from reviewing? Hm, maybe after one month of further thinking.

What are we talking about?

The following is a list of journals run by Elsevier, Springer, and De Gruyter. Elsevier has profit margins of 37.17% and Springer 35.80% (see Müller, 2012 for the math and references). English Wikipedia lists the wrong numbers. Check the Reed Elsevier Annual Reports and Financial Statements, p. 9 for the actual profits of Elsevier. We do not know the profits of de Gruyter, but since the prices per page are similar, I guess the profits are too. If they are not, de Gruyter is inefficient and expensive, which is worse than beeing efficient and expensive, isn’t it?

Here the lists:

  • Elsevier:
    • Assessing Writing,
    • Computers and Composition,
    • Discourse,
    • Context and Media,
    • English for Specific Purposes,
    • Journal of Communication Disorders,
    • Journal of English for Academic Purposes,
    • Journal of Fluency Disorders,
    • Journal of Neurolinguistics,
    • Journal of Phonetics,
    • Journal of Pragmatics,
    • Journal of Second Language Writing,
    • Language and Communication,
    • Language Sciences,
    • Lingua
  • Springer:
    • Linguistics and Philosophy,
    • Journal of Logic, Language and Information,
    • The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics,
    • Journal of East Asian Linguistics,
    • Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,
    • Language Resources and Evaluation,
    • Machine Translation,
    • Morphology,
    • Natural Language & Linguistic Theory,
    • An International Journal of Semantics and Its Interfaces in Grammar,
    • An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature,
    • Russian Linguistics,
    • International Journal for the Study of Russian and other Slavic Languages
  • de Gruyter:
    • Journal of African Languages and Linguistics,
    • Linguistics,
    • Theoretical Linguistics,
    • The Linguistic Review,
    • Folia Linguistica,
    • Probus,
    • Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft,
    • International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching,
    • Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik,
    • Journal of Politeness Research,
    • Cognitive Linguistics,
    • Chinese as a Second Language Research,
    • Journal of Literary Semantics,
    • Multicultural Learning and Teaching,
    • Intercultural Pragmatics,
    • Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft,
    • Humor,
    • Text & Talk,
    • Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur,
    • Germanistik,
    • Anglia

Some of these journals I never heard of before, but some are pretty important and I would not want to miss them. So, what can we do? Maybe the approach by the DFG to support author pays models is better than I first thought. It is Wandel durch Annäherung (`change through rapprochement‘). People see that there are free articles and want more of that kind. But on the other hand it is protectionistic: It increases the visibility of researchers working in Germany. Researchers that do not have such financial support cannot publish that way.

But there is one thing we can do right away: We can take the journals of our societies and turn them into Open Access journals. The computational linguists did this with their journal Computational Linguistics (MIT Press). Basically all important publications in CL (except books) are OA now: the journal and the conference proceedings of Coling and ACL. The Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft (the journal of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) is published by de Gruyter. Every member of the society gets a printed copy and the society pays de Gruyter for this. We could negotiate with De Gruyter to make the journal OA. If they do not want this, we change the publisher. The same applies to Language, the journal of the Linguistics Association of America (LSA). OA is a topic of their next meeting, and maybe they decide something like this.

Books

Now for books. When I think about books, the situation is much clearer for me. I will not work in editorial boards or do any reviewing, if the book prices are higher than a factor of 8 of the costs of Amazons CreateSpace. That is, a 450 page book should not cost more than $84/80€ ($0,184/0,176€ per page). I do not think that 80€ is cheap, but this is a first step that will not affect smaller publishers with reasonable prices, but our friends from Elsevier, Springer, and de Gruyter.

I will never again publish a book by a publisher that has profit margins. (The translation rights for Grammatiktheorie and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar belong to Stauffenburg and I try to get them back. So this is an open issue. The books are freely available in German, but I made a mistake as far as the translation rights are concerned.).

Software Needed

What I would like to do next is set up a web page that has the thecostofknowledge options but in addition the options (or rather opt outs) for books. We could also state price ranges that individual signers accept.

We could use this for gathering supporters for OALI. Currently I have a list of professors who support this, but it is hand maintained … The academia list does not really work since it does not allow the opt outs and there is no possibility to leave comments. Question: Does anybody know of software that we can use? Is somebody willing and able to write it? It would be great to have a counter and some motivating animation as we have it here and all the features of thecostofknowledge. The decisions for refraining from work should be editable to allow for people like me to change their minds later.

Posted in Open Access, Software | 8 Comments