Talk:Lingua (journal)

Other Resignations and Plans for a Replacement Journal

In addition to the resignation of the editorial board, all six of the editors resigned. On October 27, 2015 the executive editor Johan Rooryck posted on his public facebook timeline: "today all 6 editors of Lingua have resigned their positions in reaction to Elsevier's refusal to accept our conditions of Fair Open Access. Independently, all 31 members of the editorial board have resigned as well. The editors will still continue their work for a few more months to fulfill their contractual duties and handle the submissions currently in their care. As soon as our contracts release us, we will announce a new journal led by the same team. It will be called 'Glossa: a journal of general linguistics', and be published by Ubiquity Press In Fair Open Access."

This comes after an hour after Marc van Oostendorp posted on his Facebook timeline "All editors and associate editors, as well as the entire editorial board of Lingua, have now resigned!". According to Dr. van Oostendorp's CV, he is a member of Lingua's editorial board. Pulu (talk) 02:47, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

References

Lingua/Glossa

Lingua was and is published by Elsevier, under the same ISSN, but with new editor and editorial board. Glossa is a new journal, edited by people that previously were involved with Lingua. Claiming the Lingua was renamed Glossa and that Elsevier started a new journal under the name Lingua is absolutely incorrect. --Randykitty (talk) 18:01, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Lingua not the same journal as it was. The entire editorial board turned into Glossa. Perhaps the term rename is wrong. I guess reestablish is better. I wouldn't characterize it as "absolutely incorrect." To suggest that the old Lingua and the new Lingua are the same is dishonest. – ishwar  (speak) 18:09, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

This article (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/whose-journal-anyway) actually asks the question of what is a journal when it moves elsewhere. I feel that you must include the linguist point of view that refer to in my ¶ above. And, you can use the article as a source. – ishwar  (speak) 18:12, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

If you look at the indexing services, you will see that all of them (ALL of them) treat the "new" Lingua as a seamless continuation of the old. You also added text that " Linguists have noted the lower quality standards at the new Lingua which include withdrawn papers due [to] plagiarism", sourcing this to a blog that's more or less a rant and clearly written by somebody who has an ax to grind. Claiming that a journal has lower quality standards because of one (ONE) retraction for plagiarism is rather harsh, I'd say: this happens to the best journals and apparently Lingua dealt with it as they should by withdrawing the article. I would not consider this blog a reliable source (it's a blog without editorial oversight) and would like to see a more solid reference for the claim about the lowered standards. I also doubt the summary statements that "linguists" regard the "old" Lingua as a hollow husk: looking at the editorial board of this "zombie", I see a large number of people from all over the world. Are those all incompetent linguists that let themselves be used by Elsevier? Also, the old journal still is publishing regularly and has a similar impact factor as Glossa. --Randykitty (talk) 18:49, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

(1) I don't see why the index services are relevant to anything. The only thing relevant is the linguist community's appraisal of the matter.

(2) Lower standards. The lower standard is not solely due to plagiarism. (Hence, why I used the word 'include.') Another issue (not mentioned in my edit) is that the new Lingua wanted to choose the new editorial board by country since many submissions are from that country and asked Johan Rooryck (the original Lingua editor now at Glossa) to pick one. Rooryck refused because he thought that any editor should be chosen by merit and not by nationality. We can mention this too.

(3) Plagiarism. Yes, it can happen. Eric Baković & Kai von Fintel's contention is that it happened because the editorial board was poor. They suspect that the plagiarism was published because the new Lingua did not even have a specialist from the subfield that the paper was in on the board.

(4) All of the editorial board of Glossa has an axe to grind. Eric Baković & Kai von Fintel both helped guide the transition from Lingua to Glossa. They obviously are aligned with Glossa. So what? It's important to have the Glossa perspective.

(5) Why is Language Log not a reliable source? It does have two editors. It's the most famous linguistic blog in the world, and every blog post is written by a linguist. (Eric Baković & Kai von Fintel are both well-known linguists.) I don't see a problem with it.

(6) I don't know the competency of the new Lingua editors. I can't say.

(7) I don't know anything about impact score. The Wikipedia page on it points out several problems with it. It doesn't matter to me or probably most linguists. We already know what the prestigious journals are and aim to publish there. (But, it's interesting that the numbers are similar. I don't know if that's a problem with the measure or not.)

(8) Elsevier still publishes presumably because they want the profits. That's what the fight was about in the first place: Open access that would be extremely expensive (and, thus, not really open access).

(9) The main thing I wanted to note is that scientific journals rely on prestige. And, that prestige comes from the editorial board of experts. The prestige does not lie with the publisher. Publishers are primarily typesetters and distribution machines. If all the editors move to a new website, new publisher, and new name, then the journal formerly known as Lingua is now Glossa. The new Lingua is a completely different journal now. It is this point of view that I think the article should have. To silence it is disingenuous because the point of view comes from linguists, and this journal was involved in a disagreement between linguists (who run the journal) and a publishing conglomerate.

– ishwar  (speak) 21:19, 30 March 2024 (UTC)