A group of linguistics journals are flipping from subscription publishing to full open access, to be published by Ubiquity Press from January 2016. We are partnering with the LingOA foundation and the Open Library of the Humanities to ensure that the Article Processing Charges (APCs) for all of these journals are fully covered by funding, which is critical to enabling this switch from the perspective of linguistics researchers. It is hoped that the successful move of these journals will spur others to move to open access as well.



The journals

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, has been newly established following the mass resignation of the editors and editorial board of the journal Lingua, whose publisher refused its request to move to an affordable open access model (see press release). Laboratory Phonology, the official journal of the Association of Laboratory Phonology, has changed publishers for the same reason, while The Journal of Portuguese Linguistics is moving from a self-published subscription model to open access, a move the editors do not believe would have been sustainable for their authors under the normal APC model.

The funding model

The funding for this move has been organised by the LingOA foundation, which has secured funding for the journals’ APCs for five years through the generosity of the Dutch funding organisations VSNU (Association of universities in the Netherlands) and NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), followed by long-term financial support from the OLH. Under this model, if an author’s funder or institution support publication costs then the APCs will be sourced this way, otherwise they will be covered by LingOA. The cost of publication, however low, is therefore no barrier to authors.

The role of Ubiquity Press

Ubiquity Press is the publisher of the journals, and provides all of the services expected of a modern publisher. In addition to this however, we also have a strong cultural fit with the linguistics community. We believe strongly in full open access, with transparent and affordable fees, and we explicitly do not lock the journals in to our platform. As the authors retain full copyright of their work, so too do the societies retain full ownership of their journals, and they are free to switch publishers at any time in future if they desire to do so. We do not actively encourage journals to leave other publishers, but we do believe very strongly in the future of open access publishing, and aim to provide a high-quality, sustainable option for those who feel themselves forced to consider alternatives.