Biolinguistics End-of-Year Notice 2024

The year is coming to an end and so is another volume of Biolinguistics. The Editorial Team takes this as an opportunity to reflect on what has happened with regard to Biolinguistics in the last year, discuss some current issues and concerns with regard to the journal but also the field at large and, lastly, sketch where we want to move with the journal in the future.

Once again, Volume 18 of Biolinguistics showcases the thematic breadth and depth of the journal and the continuing relevance and success of the biolinguistic approach: The fully-fledged Articles that are part of this volume seek to reconcile uniformity and diversity in the context of the evolution of the capacity for language (Bode, 2024), attempt to advance theoretical approaches to the nature of the language faculty (Ginsburg, 2024; Song, 2024), take a critical perspective on the linguistic capabilities of large language models (LLMs; Carchidi, 2024), or deal with the inference of theoretical work to neurolinguistic investigations and our understanding of language in the brain (Shi, 2024). Compared to the previous volume, book reviews have made a comeback with reviews of Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis (Chomsky et al., 2023; reviewed in van Gelderen, 2024) and The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics: A Contemporary Outlook (Nefdt, 2024; reviewed in Voudouris & Roe, 2024). Lastly, our Forum section has again seen lively discussion with contributions questioning how to evaluate the language abilities of LLMs (Leivada, Dentella, & Günther, 2024), arguing that so-called “laryngeal descent theory” for the origin of speech was actually never a popular line of thinking in speech-centric sciences (Ekström, 2024), and providing a minimalist perspective on ongoing discussions about the purpose of language claiming that language evolved primarily as a tool for communication (Watumull, 2024).

Regarding administrative, technical, and organizational matters we gratefully acknowledge again the continued support of the Leibnitz Institute for Psychology and the team at PsychOpen, our diamond open access publisher as well as host of our journal website. While commercial publishers and the advent of 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, continue to dominate the publishing landscape, support of Biolinguistics via the PsychOpen GOLD program is what enables our journal to continue to be a so-called diamond open access journal that is run by the biolinguistics research community, for the biolinguistics research community. That is, authors publishing with Biolinguistics do not pay any publication fee for their articles and readers can access all published content at no cost on our website, as well as in relevant online archives and databases. Therefore, we encourage our readers and the (bio-)linguistic research community at large to continue submitting their work to Biolinguistics to support this 18-year-old (and counting) initiative for an equitable approach to scholarly publishing. We welcome empirical as well as theoretical contributions from any field, provided that the authors can explain how their work touches upon key biolinguistic issues.

While there is no doubt that well-motivated empirical studies require (prior) solid theorizing, the Editorial Team would nevertheless welcome an increase in more empirically oriented as well as experimental contribution to the journal in the future. At this point, we feel safe to say that Biolinguistics has established itself as a well-known publishing outlet in more linguistically-oriented circles. But biolinguistics as a field is, by definition, an interdisciplinary endeavor especially in the so-called “strong sense” of the term (Boeckx & Grohmann, 2007) or perhaps the “broad sense” (Mendívil-Giró, forthcoming), which is why we hope that our journal will also increasingly attract submissions from people attempting to provide answers to questions that necessarily require the combination of linguistic insights with insights from related disciplines along the lines of the by now classic work of Eric Lenneberg (1967, 1969) and other pioneers. One recent line of research that more or less perfeclty fit into this category are all the studies published in Biolinguistics that sought to evaluate the capabilties of LLMs from a linguistic perspective. We welcome such contributions also in the future, but would like to encourage the community at large to also consider our journal as an outlet for other kinds of empirical and especially experimental work.

To comply with “Plan S” (cOAlition S, n.d.), we include the following basic statistics about submissions, reviews, and published pieces as part of this end-of-year notice: In 2024, our journal received 83 bona fide submissions. For submissions that the Editorial Team decided to send out for review, 47 review reports were requested. However, only 29 review reports were actually received. Like many other journals, finding suitable reviewers who are actually willing to contribute their time and expertise to Biolinguistics remains a challenge. We hope that emphasizing once more that our journal is completely community-run, free to publish and read, and fully 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 11 days for decisions to reject and 109 days for decisions to accept a manuscript. A total of 9.64% of all manuscripts submitted to Biolinguistics in 2024 were ultimately accepted for publication, a relatively low number which also reflects the high number of manuscripts received that, regrettably, do not at all fall into the focus and scope of the journal.

Lastly, like last year 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 readers and potential authors an impression of the visibility of work published with us: In the year 2024, 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 31,000 times (a 50% increase compared to last year). A total of more than 27,000 copies of PDF files of published articles has been downloaded from our website. The most-viewed (including abstract views, as well as views of the HTML and XML versions) as well as most-downloaded (i.e., as a PDF file) article was Katzir (2023), with more than 2,000 impressions and almost 800 downloaded PDF copies. In addition, a large number of articles published in recent years in previous volumes continue to generate significant traffic and downloads (e.g., Wacewicz et al., 2020; Satık, 2022; Krivochen, 2023), which we take as testament to the timely relevance and interest of the biolinguistic research community in the work we publish.

Statistics

Reviewers