Language Science Press (LSP) is an
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
scholarly publishing house specializing in linguistics, formally set up in 2014. Language Science Press publishes books on a central storage and archiving server in combination with print on-demand services. Books are published under the
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
CC-BY license as a standard. As of November 2022, the catalog lists 217 books in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or Chinese. A total of 30 books are published every year, including monographs and edited volumes.
History
Language Science Press goes back to the Open Access in Linguistics (OALI) initiative, which was started by Stefan Müller and colleagues at the
Free University of Berlin in August 2012. In its preliminary stages, the initiative consisted of finding a supporters’ base within the global linguistics community.
In a second phase, a grant proposal was jointly submitted by
Martin Haspelmath and
Stefan Müller for the call “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities”. Funding came then from the
German Research Foundation
The German Research Foundation (german: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germ ...
for the development of a full-fledged business model and its realization (Language Science Press) starting June 2014.
From 2016 to 2018, Language Science Press was sponsored by
Humboldt University in Berlin. Later, Language Science Press was supported by 105 institutions worldwide in a first round from 2018 to 2020. Currently, 115 institutions are listed as sponsors in a second round from 2020 to 2022.
In 2022, a book they published ('A Grammar of Gyeli' by Nadine Grimm) won the prestigious
Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, as awarded by the
Linguistic Society of America.
Publication process
Every book published via Language Science Press goes through a predefined workflow that relies in part on a community of voluntary proofreaders. There are in total five stages:
# Submission: A first draft of the manuscript is submitted by the author(s) to the respective series's editor(s).
# Review: Two reviewers are chosen by the respective series's editor for
peer review.
# Proofreading: Community proofreaders inspect the revised manuscript.
# Typesetting: A final typographic check is carried out by Language Science Press.
# Publication: The now complete book is published and made freely available according to the principles of
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
.
Open commentaries and reviews and community proofreading are made possible by
PaperHive. Since at least September 2020, Language Science Press has also been using
docLoop, which allows for the community feedback to be turned into issues on
GitHub. All books are subject to th
Generic Style Rules for Linguistics.
Setup
Language Science Press is currently organized in 30 series:
Advances in Historical LinguisticsAfrican Language Grammars and DictionariesClassics in LinguisticsComprehensive Grammar LibraryComputational Models of Language EvolutionConceptual Foundations of Language ScienceContact and MultilingualismContemporary African LinguisticsCurrent Issues in BilingualismEmpirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and SyntaxEuroSLA StudiesHistory and Philosophy of the Language SciencesImplemented GrammarsLanguage VariationLanguages of the CaucasusMorphological InvestigationsNiger-Congo Comparative StudiesOpen Generative SyntaxOpen Germanic LinguisticsOpen Romance LinguisticsOpen Slavic LinguisticsPhraseology and Multiword ExpressionsResearch on Comparative GrammarStudies in Caribbean LanguagesStudies in Diversity LinguisticsStudies in Laboratory PhonologyTextbooks in Language Sciences
Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface
Topics in Phonological DiversityTranslation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing
The publisher's Advisory Board decides upon series proposals. Authors submit their manuscripts to a specific series. The publisher's website states that each manuscript is reviewed by at least two reviewers determined by the series editors.
Partnerships
Language Science Press has a partnership with
Knowledge Unlatched, a global library consortium approach to funding
open access books.
The publishing house maintains a list of supporters shown online. Notable supporters include
Noam Chomsky and
Steven Pinker.
Digital typography
Language Science Press uses the
editor
Overleaf
Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing, editing and publishing scientific documents.
It partners with a wide range of scientific publishers to provide official journal LaTeX templates, and direct submission links.
...
as a platform. To facilitate the typesetting of manuscripts in linguistics and hence the overall publishing process, Language Science Press has also been developing own packages for
. For example,
langsci-avm
provides a specialized syntax for typesetting potentially complex
attribute-value matrices (AVMs).
The source code of books is available from a
GitHub repository.
Public repository of Language Science Press
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See also
* University of Hawaiʻi Press
* Open Library of Humanities
References
External links
*
Official blog
Their github repositories
The catalog of all published books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Language Science Press
Academic publishing companies
Open access publishers
Book publishing companies of Germany
Publishing companies of Germany
Publishing companies established in 2013
2013 establishments in Germany