Speaking of Society-University Partnerships, Check out what the Linguistic Society of America is Doing

Speaking (in my previous post) of scholarly society-university partnerships to advance non-toll access scholarly communications, check out what the Linguistic Society of America is doing in its eLanguage program. With partners, the LSA is “co-publishing” six gold OA journals and facilitating access to the archives for two more (IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, which became Pragmatics. Note that IPrA Papers in Pragmatics was founded and edited (1987-1990) by linguistic anthropologists Alessandro Duranti and Bambi Schieffelin.).  The other journals are Constructions, Dialogue & Discourse, Journal of Experimental Linguistics, Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and Semantics and Pragmatics.

In addition to a range of LSA and non-LSA affiliated groups, university/government partners behind these journals include:  the Ministry of Science and Research of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, Stanford University, MIT, and University of Texas-Austin.

I feel foolish that I am only learning about this amazing effort now. (I have been away from my own linguistic anthropology work for some time…) A full prospectus (dated Septemebr 15, 2006!!!) is accessible here on the LSA website. The journal portal itself is here at http://www.elanguage.net/.

The effort appears to be thriving.  Congratulations to the LSA and its partners!  (I am going to have to weave this effort into my revision of my AAA paper on society partnerships.)