Five linguistics journals start own Open Access platform
Five renowned international linguistics journals have decided to leave their publisher and publish their content on a freely accessible website. The new platform will be called LingOA and will be based in The Netherlands. The editorial boards of the magazines want to publish through what they call Fair Open Access.Fair Open Access is, in the eyes of the people behind LingOA, characterized by four conditions. Firstly, the prize of publishing an article should be fair. Secondly, articles that are published should be accessible for anybody and not disappear behind a pay wall. The third and fourth conditions are that the author keeps all the rights of the article and the editorial office should be the owner of the journal’s name. Open Access publisher Ubiquity Press meets these conditions, according to LingOA, and will publish the articles. For example, publishing an article at Ubiquity press costs 400 euros, where the commercial publishers will ask at least 1000 euros. These costs are called the Article Processing Charges (ACP’s).
For the long term, a deal has been closed with the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH), which guarantees that the journals will keep existing after the first five years. According to the Association of universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), LingOA chose The Netherlands as the country to start, because Linguistics is a strong field in Dutch science and the support for Open Access is bigger here than in other countries. Starting January 2016, the first journals LabPhon and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics will publish at Ubiquity Press. Some others are still negotiating with their current publishers about Fair Open Access.
The six Dutch universities in The Netherlands that offer Linguistic studies guarantee the financial security for the editors in the first five years, and The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) provides funding. The VSNU writes at its website that the publishing model is expected to have changed completely after five years, so that financial guarantees from the universities will not be necessary anymore.
