Biolinguistics End-of-Year Notice 2022

The year 2022 is coming to an end and with it another volume of Biolinguistics, Volume 16—the first volume published with our new publisher, PsychOpen GOLD. PsychOpen GOLD is an open-access publishing platform run by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology, and we are happy and grateful that the team at PsychOpen GOLD has adopted Biolinguistics as one of the select number of journals it helps publish and operate. For our readers and authors, the changes are probably most visible when visiting the Biolinguistics website or when reading one of the new papers published this year: Both, the website and our article layout, have received a revamp and adhere to the modern look of the PsychOpen GOLD platform.

The changes resulting from switching from our previously self-operated server infrastructure to PsychOpen GOLD are not just visual in nature: The switch to our new professional publishing platform has brought with it a myriad of technical improvements which, we hope, will make Biolinguistics fit for the future of scientific publishing. While Biolinguistics has always been an online-only publication, in the past we have only published typeset PDFs of accepted articles. Due to our move to a professional publisher, from this year onwards, all papers published in Biolinguistics are available in three different file formats (PDF, HTML, and XML) which dramatically increases the machine-readability of our content, its discoverability in search engines, and the ways in which papers published in our journal are indexed and archived by third parties.

Similarly, and maybe even more importantly for all our authors, all new papers published in Biolinguistics are now automatically assigned a so-called digital object identifier (DOI), essentially a unique token that identifies an article and the venue where it was published. This is also true for all papers published before 2022, which have been assigned DOIs retroactively during our move to PsychOpen GOLD. Over the past decade, DOIs have become an internationally accepted and almost universally used standard for identifying academic, professional, or government information. More practically for readers (and authors), this means that citation information of any past, current, or future Biolinguistics publication can now be inserted into your reference manager automatically using the DOI which will be used to retrieve citation information.

Another change from this year onwards will be that in order to comply with “Plan S”, an influential open-access publishing guideline issued by cOAlition S, a consortium of national research agencies and funders mainly from Europe, Biolinguistics will start publishing basic statistics about submissions, reviews, and published pieces as part of these end-of-year notices. You will find the first of these short reports below where you can see that in 2022 our journal received 53 bona fide submissions. For those submissions that the Editorial Team decided to send out for review, a total of 41 review reports was requested. However, only 23 reports were actually received. This is to say that the trend of agreeing to carry out reviews yet never actually submitting a review report, which we and others (e.g., D’Arcy & Salmons, 2021) have already observed in recent years, has been continuing. Despite certain difficulties in obtaining suitable review reports within a reasonable timeframe, our team has succeeded in ensuring a fast and transparent editorial process with an average of 13 days for decisions to reject and 122 days for decisions to accept a manuscript. In total, only 11.32% of submission received in 2022 were accepted, a very low number which reflects the fact that we continue to receive many manuscripts that do not fall into the focus and scope of Biolinguistics and are therefore desk-rejected without further review.

Another statistic potentially of interest to (prospective) authors publishing with Biolinguistics is the number of page views and downloads of the content we publicize. As already mentioned above, the technical improvements that came as part of the move to PsychOpen GOLD increased the discoverability and accessibility of our content which is also reflected in page view and download numbers: In the year 2022, the individual pages of articles published in Biolinguistics have been viewed a total of more than 13,000 times. In addition, a total of more than 9,000 PDF files of published articles has been downloaded. Articles published only now in 2022 have also seen substantive traffic for their HTML and XML versions, which sometimes are more convenient to read using a web browser and can more easily be indexed by the automated crawlers used by internet search engines. Moreover, besides the traffic for new articles on our website published this year, the continued steady page views and downloads of PDF files for all the articles published in the past 15 years before our move to PsychOpen GOLD can be seen as a testimony to the continued relevance of the kind of research that Biolinguistics publishes to the scientific community.

To close in customary fashion, we would like to emphasize once again that despite the switch to PsychOpen GOLD—and therefore the involvement of a professional publishing platform—Biolinguistics always has been and continues to be a community-run journal. Its success depends vitally on the journal’s authors, reviewers, readers, and supporters as well as the members of the Biolinguistics Advisory Board, the Editorial Board, and the Task Team. In this context, we would therefore like to express our gratitude to the colleagues who have carried out reviews for Biolinguistics throughout the past year. Their names are listed below in alphabetical order (by last name). We very much appreciate their participation, support, and feedback which constitute an important service to our scientific community. Lastly, the way in which you express your support for Biolinguistics may vary, but we wholeheartedly invite you to encourage your academic peers as well as students who do work relevant to the scope of our journal to submit their findings to Biolinguistics.

Statistics

Reviewers