 | |
| Status | Non-profit enterprise company with limited liability |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2013; 13 years ago (2013) |
| Country of origin | Germany |
| Headquarters location | Berlin |
| Distribution | The main means of distribution is electronic |
| Key people | Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) andStefan Müller (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) |
| Revenue | Not-for-profit publisher |
| Official website | http://langsci-press.org/ |
Language Science Press (LSP) is anopen accessscholarly publishing house specializing in linguistics, formally set up in 2014.[1][2] Language Science Press publishes books on a central storage and archiving server in combination with print on-demand services.[3][4] Books are published under theCreative Commons CC-BY license as a standard. As of March 2025, the catalog lists 277 books in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or Chinese. A total of about 30 books are published every year, including monographs and edited volumes.
Language Science Press goes back to the Open Access in Linguistics (OALI) initiative,[5] which was started by Stefan Müller and colleagues at theFree University of Berlin in August 2012. In its preliminary stages, the initiative aimed to find a supporters’ base forDiamond Open Access within the global linguistics community.
In a second phase, a grant proposal was jointly submitted byMartin Haspelmath andStefan Müller for the call “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities”.[6] Funding came then from theGerman Research Foundation 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 byHumboldt University in Berlin. Later, Language Science Press was supported by 105 institutions worldwide in a first round from 2018 to 2020. A total of 115 institutions are listed as sponsors in a second round from 2020 to 2022.[7]
In 2022, a book they published (A Grammar of Gyeli by Nadine Grimm[8]) won the prestigiousLeonard Bloomfield Book Award, as awarded by theLinguistic Society of America.[9]
Every book published via Language Science Press goes through a predefined workflow[10] that relies in part on a community of voluntary proofreaders. There are in total five stages:
Open commentaries and reviews and community proofreading are made possible byPaperHive.[12][13] Since at least September 2020, Language Science Press has also been usingdocLoop,[14][15] which allows for the community feedback to be turned into issues onGitHub. All books are subject to theGeneric Style Rules for Linguistics.
Language Science Press is currently organized in 34 series:
The publisher's Advisory Board decides upon series proposals. Authors submit their manuscripts to a specific series.
Language Science Press has a partnership withKnowledge Unlatched, a global library consortium approach to fundingopen access books.
The publishing house maintains a list of supporters shown online.[16]
Language Science Press uses the editorOverleaf 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 complexattribute-value matrices (AVMs).[17][18]
The source code of books is available from aGitHub repository.[19]
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