Biolinguistics End-of-Year Notice 2025

When the year comes to an end, so does yet another volume of Biolinguistics. As is customary, the Editorial Team takes this as an opportunity to summarize and reflect on what has happened with regard to the journal in the last year scientifically and organizationally, as well as briefly sketch some of the things that what we have planned for the journal in the year 2026. Moreover, we will also discuss some statistics concerning the number of submissions we have received, sent for review, and ultimately accepted or rejected, as well as some numbers reflecting the journal readership as quantified by accesses and downloads on the Biolinguistics web site.

If Biolinguistics were printed instead of being a diamond open access journal published exclusively online, Volume 19 would be relatively thin compared to some recent previous volumes. However, the contributions that made it into the current volume nevertheless showcase the thematic breadth and depth of the journal. In a short theoretical article, Blümel and Collins (2025) draw a deep connection between smuggling and labeling, suggesting that the movement of the smuggler in a smuggling derivation can be triggered by the labeling algorithm. Beyond this, this volume sees a number of extensive and topically diverse contributions to our Forum section: While one contribution discusses the number sense in relation to human ability for syntax (Mendívil-Giró, 2025), Murphy and colleagues (2025) set out to demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT do not represent fundamental principles of linguistic structure as defined by contemporary theoretical linguistics. Lastly, Bernd Bierl’s (2025) proposal of a theoretical framework for what he calls a “bio-ethological 4E linguistics” constitutes a contribution from a somewhat unorthodox perspective when seen from “mainstream biolinguistics”, which we think is testament to the important function that our Forum section plays as a place for open exchange for anyone who is interested in the biological foundations of language, regardless of their theoretical persuasions or professional background.

For administrative, technical, and production-related matters, we gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the Leibnitz Institute for Psychology and the team at PsychOpen who now for several years have been acting as our diamond open access publisher and host of our journal website. The support of Biolinguistics as part of the PsychOpen GOLD program is what enables our journal to continue to be a so-called diamond open access journal—no fees for authors nor readers. Moreover, our journal is run at minimum cost by the biolinguistics research community, for the biolinguistics research community. These aspects stand in stark contrast to the so-called “hybrid” open access journals run by for-profit publishers charging authors a hefty fee that can go into the thousands of euros if they want to make their article publicly available without potential readers having to pay subscription or download fees. While commercial publishers certainly continue to have the upper hand, we nevertheless believe that the diamond open access model is ultimately more sustainable as it does not require funding agencies to budget tens of thousands of euros for publication fees, when instead programs like PsychOpen could be funded directly to provide publishing services. Against this background, we encourage our readers and the (bio-)linguistic research community to continue submitting their work to Biolinguistics to support this now 19-year-old (and counting) journal and initiative for an equitable approach to scholarly publishing.

The year 2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of Biolinguistics and we are planning to commemorate this special occasion in two different ways. Firstly, as part of our regular Forum section, we will invite selected voices from the biolinguistics research community as well as our Editorial and Advisory Board to contribute short reflective pieces on the history and current status of the journal and the field more broadly. Secondly, following up on an interdisciplinary workshop on the topic “Sign Language Grammars, Parsing Models, & the Brain” co-organized by one of the members of our Editorial Team this year, we will be publishing general proceedings documenting the event as well as select contributions in the form of full-fledged Articles, Briefs, or Forum contributions as part of a special issue of Biolinguistics. So, stay tuned for the accouncements of relevant calls for papers and further information on these matters being disclosed in the new year. Biologically oriented research on language is still thriving (see, e.g., the recent review by Arnon et al., 2025) and it is our mission as the Editorial Team to ensure that Biolinguistics will continue to be an accessible resource for the community.

To comply with “Plan S” (cOAlition S, n.d.), we report the following statistics about submissions, reviews, and published pieces as part of this end-of-year notice: In 2025, our journal received 47 bona fide submissions. For submissions that the Editorial Team decided to send out for review, 39 review reports were requested. However, only 25 review reports were ultimately received. Like many other journals, finding suitable reviewers who are willing to contribute their time and expertise to Biolinguistics remains a challenge. Because the available time that experts can spend on reviewing is limited, we encourage potential reviewers to prioritize diamond open access journals such as Biolinguistics in their efforts. Despite noticeable difficulties in securing suitable review reports within a reasonable time frame, the Editorial Team has nevertheless managed to ensure a fast and transparent editorial process with an average of 17 days for decisions to reject and 95 days for decisions to accept a manuscript. A total of 10.64% of all manuscripts submitted to Biolinguistics in 2025 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 or do not meet our scholarly and scientific standards.

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 readers and potential authors an impression of the visibility of work published with us: In the year 2025, 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 65,000 times, representing more than 50% increase compared to 2024. A total of more than 56,000 copies of PDF files of published articles have been downloaded from our website, which also marks a twofold increase. The most-viewed (including abstract views, as well as views of the HTML and XML versions) as well as most-downloaded article was again Katzir (2023), with more than 2,000 impressions and more than 1,000 downloads. This was followed by Watumull (2024) with more than 2,600 impressions and more than 500 downloads. Mendívil-Giró (2025), a recently published paper from the current issue, came in third with more than 1,800 impressions and more than 700 downloads. These three papers deal with quite diverse topics—the impact of LLMs on the field, philosophical issues such as the relation of language and thought, and the possible relation of syntax to humans’ mathematical abilities—which we take as testament to the thematic breadth and relevance of the work we publish for the biolinguistic research community.

Statistics

Reviewers