On 18th July 2014, EL Publishing (ELPub) was established by Peter K. Austin, David Nathan and Julia Sallabank to publish top quality peer-reviewed open access electronic and print journals, multimedia and monographs on documentation, description and support of endangered languages. We publish on the theory and practice of language documentation, language description, sociolinguistics, language policy, and language revitalisation. All publications are free to download under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) licence and are published at no cost to authors. Design and layout of our publications is managed by Tom Castle, a professional designer and artist based in London.
ELPub builds upon extensive editorial and publishing experience of the Founding Editors, including 11 years of engagement with the journal Language Documentation and Description (LDD), published annually since 2003 and anonymously peer-reviewed since 2011. Peter K. Austin has been editing books and journal special issues since 1983. David Nathan has been a book editor and multimedia author since 1994. Julia Sallabank was commissioning editor at Oxford University Press for applied linguistics and language teaching methodology for 16 years (1990-2006) and has edited and co-edited books and journal special issues since 2011. We are supported by Gerrit Dimmendaal, Jeff Good, Lenore Grenoble and Anthony C. Woodbury as Consulting Editors and an international Editorial Advisory Board. All submissions are double-blind peer reviewed, and we currently have a rejection rate of over 80% for journal articles.
To date we have published 13 volumes of Language Documentation and Description and are currently working on Volume 14 which is a special issue edited by Haley De Korne and Wesley Y. Leonard entitled Reclaiming languages: Contesting and decolonizing ‘language endangerment’ from the ground up. This is scheduled to appear in June 2017. We also have one multimedia publication, and our first book-length collection Language Land and Song: Studies in honour of Luise Hercus appeared on 2nd May (available for free download here). All publications on the site are fully indexed and searchable via a Search facility designed and built by Edward Garrett of Pinedrop.
The EL Publishing website has been attracting an increasing number of visitors (over 2,500 for the month of April 2017) with rising numbers of downloaded papers and chapters over the past year: eg. visitor numbers and downloads doubled in March 2017 compared to March 2016.
For up-to-date information on EL Publishing visit our website or like us on Facebook. If you are interested in submitting a paper or a book proposal for publication please contact info@elpublishing.org.
Great work you guys! and very informative blog. I will pass it along to our LED TDR team as we are talking of some joint publications in the future. And see you at the latest in Warsaw in november to discuss plans!
Great to see books now, too!
Two comments:
– it would be nice to be able to download the whole book. Currently, one has to download each and every chapter on its own (or I have not been able to find the button “download whole book”)
– The CC-BY-NC license has a number of problems. See this brochure by Creative Commons and Wikimedia for extensive information about the pros and cons: https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Spezial:Dateipfad/CC-NC_Leitfaden_2013_engl.pdf
For instance, language schools are commercial if they charge a fee. They cannot use your content. My blog is commercial if I have some ads on it to set off the cost of running the server. I cannot include your content. Wikipedia cannot use your content either since it must be possible to distribute Wikipedia on DVDs, against a fee, which is, again commercial, and so on.
I understand the motives behind the choice, but please have a look at the pdf linked above to see whether there are not better alternatives to achieve the same goals with less collateral damage.