OLH Interview with Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL)

In this interview, we speak with the editorial team at Semantics of Natural Languages about the journal's transition to diamond open access, the research communities that inspired their approach, and the importance of collective participation in scholarly publishing.

OLH: Thank you for agreeing to speak with us about the launch of SNL. To begin, could you tell us how the idea to flip the journal first emerged and what ultimately prompted the change? Was there a specific catalyst, or was it a more gradual, long-term shift?

Amy Rose Deal: There was a catalyst. As editors of the previous journal with Springer Nature, the three of us received an ultimatum about a year ago that we needed to increase the number of papers we accept per year immediately, and by a significant amount. This came after years of pressure to publish more papers annually. And that prompted us to think about whether we wanted to keep working with Springer Nature, because even if we could have met that condition, do we really want to work under conditions where we are served with demands like this? And we decided that we didn't. And in linguistics, I think we have these wonderful, very salient examples of other journals that have flipped, and OLH has played an important role in that. So, we talked amongst ourselves about just walking away from Springer versus starting a new journal elsewhere. We reached out to Johan Rooryck, and he put OLH on our radar, and here we are.

Florian Schwarz: I would add that, certainly from my perspective, the catalyst landed on fertile ground in terms of wanting to make scholarship more accessible, to ensure we have full editorial control, and that we’re not being given mandates driven by things that aren’t based on what we see as the ideal kind of scholarly institution we want the journal to be.

OLH: You mention an ‘ultimatum’ from Springer, expectations to produce more, and to increase the volume of accepted articles in the journal. Could you say more about the impact this has on editorial and academic work?  

Florian Schwarz: I think all those experiences just reflected a complete disconnect from the publisher side to our field and the workings of our field, the size of our field, the output. It's not like there's tonnes and tonnes out there and we're failing to attract that work. It's a very narrow and specific focus. And we have quality standards and those two things together made it impossible to change output volume without giving up on some of those core editorial commitments.

OLH: How did it go when you first introduced the idea of flipping the journal to the full editorial team, and what were their initial reactions? Was it easy to build consensus among the editorial board? 

Amy Rose Deal: We talked amongst ourselves and were on the same page about this. We reached out to the editorial board, telling them about the ultimatum and our idea to start a new Diamond Open Access journal. We asked for their blessing and got it in overwhelming measure. Nobody said this was a bad idea. Some people suggested that we could consider accepting more papers, but also that ultimatums are unacceptable, so it was not controversial.

OLH: You mentioned reaching out to Johan Rooryck, co-editor-in-chief of Glossa. Are there any other journals or research communities that inspired your approach?

Florian Schwarz: I think one component was that I'm an editor at Glossa Psycholinguistics, which is not with OLH, but it is through the same foundation that Johan Rooryck runs and supported by e-scholarship. It's a different funding model, but the overall values and setup are very similar. I certainly brought to the initial conversations that the three of us had insights from that experience. There are various others, like the very early pioneer Semantics and Pragmatics. Glossa really provided the template for jumping ship with a long-established publisher and carrying forward its tradition in a new open access model.

OLH: Before the journal flip, how familiar were you with Diamond Open Access and what attracted you to the model once you discovered it?

Amy Rose Deal: I think probably the three of us would give three different answers. My answer is, I think these terms are terrible and confusing. When I’ve told people about this transition, they’ve often responded, ‘Oh, okay, so you’re going into open access’. I then have to explain that it’s more complicated than that, particularly around corporate ‘open access’ and the fact that ‘free to read’ isn’t the only consideration. The fact that some journals are not with for-profit publishers is something that linguists generally know, because we know about Glossa and we know about Language, which is the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. I would guess that pretty much all linguists would be aware of at least some not-for-profit journals. And then in semantics, of course, we have the particular examples that Florian already mentioned.

Clemens Steiner-Mayr: I must say I had a similar experience. Before coming to this, I thought open access was basically what diamond open access is. I had no idea that there were these tiers. I would have not considered the Springer Open Access version open access actually, but apparently that's the way it is thought of by some people or at least being promoted by Springer, so, yes, it was a learning curve for me as well. 

Florian Schwarz: Yeah, I think on my part, I was a bit more keyed into that part of the world. As an associate editor for Glossa Psycholinguistics, I saw the then editors-in-chief put together the journal and handle all the different aspects. It's a different model, like I mentioned, in that it depends on voluntary author contributions, but it is diamond open access and based very much on the same values.

OLH: How well funded are researchers in your field? Could you talk a little about the significance of article processing charges, or transformative agreements in enabling or limiting open access?

Amy Rose Deal: Transformative agreement is one of those terms of art or weasel words, if you will. I only know the meaning of that term because I was on a faculty Senate committee for the library, which is how I learned about transformative agreements. I work for the University of California, and we have all these agreements with places, but I think people generally don't know what those things are and what they mean for the scholarly ecosystem. And so, they're not making decisions about where to submit their paper based on APCs or transformative agreements or anything like that. It's sort of like an infrastructure that's not exactly hidden, it's just not salient to people. 

How well funded are people? It depends where you are and who you are. I mean, I think most linguistics research in the US is very cheap because most linguistics research doesn't use fancy machines, and most linguistics faculty in the US don’t need grant funding in order to have grad students around, which together are what tends to make science very expensive. You tend to be paying maybe a few research assistants or possibly postdocs sometimes, and human subjects you pay small amounts. We are not a lab science where people are running these giant research groups as a basic condition of doing science. So, I think how well funded we are, it depends on what you're comparing us to. If you're comparing us to literature, we're probably pretty well funded. If you're comparing us to psychology, we're basically not funded. I think the question is, how do people think about APCs in their publication decision? And I'm sure there's a lot of variation about that, but the people who I know, their experiences with this, they just don't think about it at all. It's something that happens too late in the process for them to think about. And that's by design, right? There’s a reason for that. Publishers are not putting the cost right there, right at the top of instructions for authors. They want to wait until you're deeply invested and you feel like you have a whole lot of sunk cost before they're like, ‘yeah, and that's going to be $5,000’. But Florian among this group is the one who best represents the more funded part of (US) linguistics.

Florian Schwarz: Well, there's linguistics and there's the semantic pragmatic space that our journal is in in particular. I would say, traditionally and in general, the subject space of our journal is generally not funded through any external grants or anything like that. There are exceptions and there is a part of the field that over the last decade or two has embraced experimental work with human subjects, and that is represented in our journal, and that's an area that I specialise in. There’s been a drastic shift in the capacity to collect large amounts of behavioural data for very little money online. I haven't checked, but I would guess probably most, if not all experimental papers, maybe with the exception of language acquisition work with children where that's harder, is probably with adult online collected data. Sometimes that's even through university subject pools and costs no money. So, in that sense, there's very little incentive for people to get funding. This is certainly true in the US context. In the European context, there is more grant funding on the theoretical side, and Clemens can maybe speak more to that. Right now, and looking forward, the funding situation outlook is much more favourable in Europe than it is in the US. 

Clemens Steiner-Mayr: I think that's certainly right. So, in Europe, the bulk of research that actually comes out in linguistics is in one way or another funded through external agencies. The reason for that is that there is little to no tenure track positions here. That includes a lot of theoretical research as well.

OLH: Did you consult with any librarians or libraries about funding? And what role did these conversations play in the transition?

Amy Rose Deal: We talked to Johan Rooryck, and he told us that we should learn about OLH, and we did. And we were excited about OLH. And we appreciate that OLH is connecting to libraries so that we don't personally have to.

Florian Schwarz: I think we had our eyes set on trying to make things work out with the OLH very early on, and thankfully it did. I have been in touch with the Vice Provost at the University of Pennsylvania who runs the library system, who immediately pointed out that they're excited about this and they're big fans and supporters of the OLH. So, I think in a sense, in line with what Amy Rose said, I would assume all of our institutions' libraries are part of and contributing to the OLH and are very happy about that infrastructure being built. And because of that, and because things worked out with the OLH, we didn't really have to go down an individual route of seeking direct support from the libraries of our institutions.

OLH: what are your thoughts about the original ‘zombie’ journal you've left behind? And what can research communities and publishers like the OLH do to help transfer prestige and reputation to the new journal? 

Amy Rose Deal: Well, in this case, there's not much of a zombie journal because Springer is shutting it down. Transferring the prestige, I mean, respectfully, I don't really think that OLH can do that. I think the research community, each specific research community has to do that. I don't know that linguists or semanticists particularly care what the OLH has to say. I feel like they care what their fellow researchers in their particular area have to say. And so I think we learned from surveying our editorial board that this wasn't going to be hugely controversial. And we, inspired by Philosophical Logic, released an open letter that was signed by us and was also signed by the two original founders of our old journal. I felt that it was very important to have it clear to everyone that they were on board as well, just to clarify that this is not a controversial move. 

Florian Schwarz: We focused on trying to signal continuity as much as possible. From the very start when we made the decision to make this transition, we all agreed to stay on for some indefinite amount of time. Whereas otherwise, we might have been facing rotations out more quickly, but we wanted to make clear that we're all doing this together, we're all behind it, and it's still the names and people affiliated with it. And the fact that the founders of the original journal, who are really big figures in the field, Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer, were also openly and publicly supporting this, helped to signal all of this to the community. 

I think also that in the social media launch and the open letter that we shared, everything was geared towards making clear that we see this as the intellectual heir to the prior journal, and to encourage people as much as possible. One of the major places where prestige matters, of course, is in tenure and promotion evaluations. And so encouraging people out in the field that this may look like a new journal, but it's actually a continuation, was important. There are rigid and formalised ways of accounting for the worth of a journal, and that just takes some time. We just have to bite the bullet on that with this transition and work towards that. But I think as far as prestige in the field goes, I'm not too worried about it because of the broad community support, both from the editorial board and everybody else that's responded to it on social media and elsewhere. Everybody clearly sees this as a continuation of the journal.

Clemens Steiner-Mayr: I want to add, this is where OLH does provide real value. The feedback we’ve received on the submission system and on the way the website is set up is all super positive. I received a number of emails where people were saying, ‘this is great’. I think this is not to be sneezed at.

OLH: Returning to the open letter you mentioned above, you write that the ‘success of SNL and our field depends on collective participation—just as the advancement of diamond open access publishing does’. Could you please say a little more about that? Do you think researchers have a responsibility to support community-led publishing?

Amy Rose Deal: I was going to quote Benjamin Franklin, right? We must all hang together or else we hang separately, right? People don't want to be isolated, competing with each other as their condition of existence. And so, I think this transition is a moment for us to reflect on the fact that we don't have to just accept these legacy systems that exploit our labour. But rather, we can collectively decide to pick a better future, and here we go. It's not that hard. Someone needs to stand up and do it. So here we are standing up and doing it. And maybe everybody else who's still working for a corporate journal can do it too, because it's not that hard and it makes the world better.

Clemens Steiner-Mayr: I don't think there's a single person in the field who supports these corporate journals. If there was someone like that, they must be being paid. So, I think it's just right, but it's also easy in principle to make that switch. There's nothing holding us back. Nobody needs Springer these days. There was certainly a point in time when these publishers were needed, but that time has passed, and I think the reason why this call to action was also important is that this goes back to a previous question before, when I said I wasn't really aware that there were these tiers of open access. I think people are not that much aware of how academic publishing actually works, and why should they, right? Because they have other things that they're preoccupied with. Doing research and then trying to get this paper through the reviewing process is hard enough. And so I think, making the different tiers of open access a little bit more apparent can lead to a big change. And the most important thing, as was already mentioned, is to have papers published in such open access outlets really count for tenure track evaluations and things like that. We support this really strongly, and that's why it feels good to be part of that movement.

Florian Schwarz: I'll just add that I think you asked about community or scholar responsibility, and I do think there is, well, also in line with what Clemens said, a need for raising awareness that individual choices matter, that people can make choices. And I think they're very simple ones. Once people reflect on their attitudes towards the options that are out there, they'll see that it matters that high-profile people submit to our journal. We're already seeing this, and the uptake is really great. And I think, at least impressionistically, there are people that previously may have had reservations about submitting to Natural Language Semantics, not because of who we were and our intellectual work, but because of the fact it was with a big commercial publisher. And there are alternatives in our specific subfield, so you might as well go with them. So, I think we're able to attract more of that and we want to encourage people to send us their best work. The other piece of community involvement is peer reviewers prioritising a journal like ours over commercial publishers. And already, over the transition, which has really been happening informally over the course of this calendar year, I have felt that reviewers are more willing to accept review assignments. When the invitation includes a description of our upstart nature, that we're scholar-led and owned, and that we're diamond open access, people seem much more receptive. They often say, ‘I have a lot on my plate, but I really want to support this’. And I think that is the sort of thing, the type of showing of responsibility to try to support this movement, which in the long run also helps with building up the prestige. Because if we get the best work to appear in journals like this, then naturally over time, the journal will stand for itself as one of the premier outlets for this type of work. 

A huge thank you to the OLH, not just for the support without which we really couldn't have done this in terms of the setup, but also the great staff making all this happen in terms of the practicalities. It's really fundamental. You know, none of us are experts in the logistical side of these things. So having that support is just essential.

 

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash