Language Log

A small rant

Our field is spectacularly backwards sometimes. The web site for the journal Language is a disgrace. It doesn't even have titles and abstracts up yet for the excellent June issue, which reached me by snailmail some time ago. As for full on-line access to articles, well, the LSA's web site has a page for "LANGUAGE Online" that offers a (dead) link to a Project Muse site that promises access to the volume for 2001.

As I clicked the link and got this helpful page, several spiders and mice scurried back into the woodwork and a puff of dust wafted across the room.

In fact, Project Muse does really offer "Vol. 77 (2001) through current issue", at this address -- and the June issue is already there -- if your institution has a subscription. The disfunctional LSA page says that individual subscribers also get access, but I couldn't find any information on the Muse web site about that.

There's a free sample issue -- 77.1, March 2001.

You know, I think we could do better.

[Update: let me make it clear that I mean "we as a field could do better than we are now doing", not "some group that I profess to speak for could do better than the people now responsible". But really, under any construal, the current web site for the LSA's journal is a disgrace.]

[Response to comments:
Ken says: "The username and password for individual subscribers to get on to project muse is in the welcome letter that comes to new members and (I would hope) also makes its way to renewing people."
I say: I'm a subscriber, and I read every issue as it arrives, and I go to the meetings more often than not, but I've never seen this information. I don't doubt that it was in some accompanying letter that I didn't read. That doesn't excuse not having updated the relevant page on the journal's web site since 2001, with a dead link for the Muse connection.

Joe Tomei asks "Isn't one explanation the fact that LinguistList has soaked up much of the volunteer effort that online efforts require?"
I respond: I don't know, but LinguistList is not a substitute for a usable web site for the journal Language.

He adds "I have found that almost all the individual subscriber online systems to be problematic, and even the for profit sites (Oxford, Cambridge, Blackwell come to mind immediately) have some serious interface problems."
I reply: That hasn't been my experience. I just checked the web sites for Language Variation and Change, Computational Linguistics, International Journal of American Linguistics, American Anthropologist, American Speech, Speech Communication, and Linguistic Inquiry; all the sites were current and I didn't find any dead links. The APA, the ACL, the AAA, the ADS, etc. all seem to have working web sites that are kept current. To find a site as musty as the site for Language, I have to prospect among third-rate journals; but Language is a first-rate journal.

There are plenty of complaints to make about the scholarly and scientific publishing; I think the arguments for Open Access/author-pays approaches are compelling, for example. But this is not an argument at that level -- it's much more basic. When the journal's home page has a three-year-old dead link to the online version, it's like misspelling the editor's name on page 1. ]