A Personal Note on Open Access in Linguistics

This paper contains only known facts about open access, but they are put into a rather personal perspective that may help others to understand the importance of Open Access in science in general, and in linguistics in particular. This paper tries to motivate Open Access publishing, with a particular focus on publishing books. In Section 1, I describe the problems in accessing relevant information in economically weak countries , the problem of underpayment in the humanities, and usage restrictions of traditionally published books. Section 2 explains the factors that contribute to book prices. Section 3 briefly describes Open Access publishing and print on demand services. In Section 4, I address some challenges for Open Access publishing and suggest ways to ensure quality control, proper typesetting, and efficient marketing. Section 5 discusses Open Access approaches of profit-orientated publishers. Section 6 deals with Open Access and getting tenure and promotion , and Section 7 is about radical opinions about copyrights outside of academia. In order to make the situation in science more understandable to people living in the US and Western Europe, I want to describe my personal experiences in an Eastern Block country in the following subsection. I will then turn to book prices in relation to underpayment in the