Biolinguistics End-Of-Year Notice 2023

When the year is coming to an end, so is another volume of Biolinguistics. As is by now customary, the Editorial Team once again takes this as an opportunity to reflect on the journal’s performance in the past year, discuss current issues with regard to Biolinguistics as a journal as well as a field, and anticipate future developments.

The variety of articles published as part of Volume 17 of Biolinguistics showcase the thematic breadth and depth of the journal as well as of the biolinguistics approach: While some papers deal with the intricacies of particular formal approaches to language as such (e.g., Gärtner, 2023a; Krivochen, 2023; Milway, 2023), others take it as a starting point for identifying potentially human-unique properties (Bayırlı, 2023) or attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practical research on language evolution (Matsumoto, 2023). Besides fully-fledged Articles and so-called Briefs, the Forum section of Biolinguistics continues to be an important outlet for the community to discuss current developments (e.g., the idea that a “pragmatic grammar” may have emerged already with the appearance of genus Homo; Hillert & Fujita, 2023), spin new ideas (e.g., a reconceptualization of Merge inspired by neural data; Hoshi, 2023), and voice dissenting opinions (e.g., a discussion about Merge vs. “Lerge”; Gärtner, 2023b; Watumull & Roberts, 2023). This is especially true in the context of current developments in machine learning and its relation to (bio-)linguistic inquiry, a subject matter about which Katzir (2023) has taken a strong stance.

In this context, we would like to point out that because the field of biolinguistics lies directly at the intersection of the study of language, cognition, and artificial intelligence, the purview of Biolinguistics includes publishing papers treating different aspects of the explosion of large language models (LLMs) and their applications that we have witnessed in recent years. We explicitly welcome submissions that provide linguistically informed assessments or critiques of current developments in the field of machine learning, especially with regard to LLMs.

Against this background, we would also like to point out that from 2024 onwards, Biolinguistics will become a PCI RR-friendly journal (Peer Community In, n.d.). With this step, we further embrace contemporary open science practices and make it possible for authors to rely on the public review process of Peer Community In for reviewing their Registered Reports (RRs), which can then be transferred to Biolinguistics without undergoing additional peer review. Given the diversity of current developments around LLMs but also biolinguistics research more generally, this option provides an additional path for authors to submit relevant work to Biolinguistics.

With regard to administrative and technical matters, we gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the team at PsychOpen, based at the Leibnitz Institute for Psychology, who provide hosting and publication services for our journal. Over the past years, many commercial publishers have introduced so-called “hybrid” open access models where for-profit journals charge authors a hefty fee that can reach several thousand euros to make their article available for free to potential readers. In this respect, the support of the PsychOpen GOLD program is especially important because it enables Biolinguistics to continue to be a “diamond open access journal” that is run by the biolinguistics research community, for the biolinguistics research community: Authors publishing with Biolinguistics do not pay any publication fee and readers can access all published content at no cost on our website, as well as in relevant online archives and databases. Consequently, we encourage our readers and the (bio-)linguistic research community at large to continue submitting their work to Biolinguistics to support this 17-year-old (and counting) initiative for an equitable approach to scholarly publishing.

To comply with “Plan S” (cOAlition S, n.d.), we also include the following basic statistics about submissions, reviews, and published pieces as part of this end-of-year notice: In 2023, our journal received 54 bona fide submissions. For submissions that the Editorial Team decided to send out for review, 43 review reports were requested. However, only 29 review reports were actually received. Like many of our peer journals, particularly since 2020, finding suitable reviewers who are willing to contribute their time and expertise to Biolinguistics remains a challenge. We hope that emphasizing once again that our journal is community-run and independent from any big commercial publisher will help to improve this situation in the future. Despite noticeable difficulties in securing suitable review reports within a reasonable time frame, the Editorial Team has managed to ensure a fast and transparent editorial process with an average of 21 days for decisions to reject and 84 days for decisions to accept a manuscript. Only 16.67% of manuscripts submitted to Biolinguistics in 2023 were ultimately accepted for publication, a relatively low number which also reflects the high number of manuscripts received that, regrettably, do not fall into the focus and scope of the journal.

Lastly, we would like to draw the community’s attention to the access and download statistics for our website and the papers published in Biolinguistics over the past year, to give an impression of the visibility of work published with us: In the year 2023, the individual pages of articles published in our journal (including their machine-readable HTML and XML versions) have been viewed a total of more than 19,000 times. A total of more than 17,000 copies of PDF files of published articles has been downloaded from our website. The most-viewed article (including abstract views, as well as views of the HTML and XML versions) was Krivochen (2023), with more than 2,000 impressions. The most-downloaded article was Milway (2023), with a total of more than 700 downloaded PDF copies. In addition, a large number of articles published over the past years in previous volumes continue to generate significant traffic and downloads (e.g., Crain & Khlentzos, 2008; Niego & Benítez-Burraco, 2022; Wacewicz, et al., 2021), which is a testament to the continued relevance and interest of the research community in the work we publish.