Berlin, May 3^rd, 2021: Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the central platform for Open Access (OA) financing models, is pleased to announce that the Language Science Press (LSP) initiative has reached its crowdfunding goal and will be renewed for three more years. LSP first launched in 2017 as a three-year pilot and was met with great enthusiasm by linguists worldwide.

The second round of pledging garnered significant support from libraries around the world, ensuring that 90 more books in the field of linguistics will be unlatched in the period between 2021 and 2023 and made freely available to readers and researchers everywhere. The funds libraries contributed will support the unlatching of 30 new books per year and ensure that LSP authors do not face any book processing charges.

LSP is the leading scholar-led OA initiative in linguistics and much of its success is due to the highly active community of linguists, totalling over 1,000 members from over 50 countries. This global community has played an active role in encouraging their institutions to support the initiative, resulting in 105 library pledges in the first round and 115 pledges in the second round.

“LangSci shows with the second successful pledging round how sustainable scholar-led publishing can be made to work,” says Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff, the Press’ managing director. “Despite the pandemic, we have broadened our base and have a very resilient funding model for a continuous high-quality output."

“KU is proud to once again bear witness to the difference the efforts of LSP scholars have made in the renewal process,” said Philipp Hess, KU’s Director of Publisher Relations. “The LSP initiative serves as an example to other scholarly disciplines how to ensure sustainability of open research worldwide.”

More information about the LSP initiative and the listing of supporting institutions from both rounds is available on KU’s website: https://knowledgeunlatched.org/language-science-press.

About Language Science Press

Language Science Press is a born-digital OA publisher in linguistics. PDF versions of its books are free of charge for authors and readers. Printed books are available at competitive prices. Over 1000 linguists have published a book or a chapter with the press.

About Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched is committed to OA to academic content for readers and researchers around the world. Its online platform is the central point of contact for libraries worldwide to support OA models, book and journal collections of leading publishing houses and various OA initiatives.

Contact

Philipp Hess, Publisher Relations

philipp@knowledgeunlatched.org