By Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff, Coordinator of Language Science Press
Language Science Press (LangSci) is an open access publisher for books in linguistics. It was founded in 2014. We publish 30-40 books a year, with a total of 339 as of May 2026.
LangSci is a community-based and scholar-led publisher based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and excellence. We have 37 series ranging from Studies in Laboratory Phonology over Languages of the Caucasus to Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing.
LangSci is completely open access and does not charge book processing charges or author fees either (also known as Diamond Open Access). Our funding comes from a network of 100+ institutions worldwide which contribute to financing the platform, facilitated via Knowledge Unlatched (pledging for 2027-2029 now open). This allows the series editors to focus exclusively on content quality without having second thoughts about the marketability of a title or the solvency of an author. The two founders also have extensive networks in complementary subfields. Furthermore, linguists often work on remote languages in the global south, where Western book prices are completely prohibitive. They thus have direct experience of how exclusionary the commercial publishing practices are.
The background to Language Science Press
In 2012 a group of people found the situation in the publishing business so unbearable that they agreed that it would be worthwhile to start a bigger initiative for publishing linguistics books in platinum open access, that is, free for both readers and authors. Stefan Müller set up a web page and collected supporters, very prominent linguists from all over the world and all subdisciplines, and Martin Haspelmath and I then founded LangSci. At about the same time the DFG had announced a program for open access monographs and we applied (Müller & Haspelmath 2013) and were funded ( only two out of eighteen applications received funding). This acted as the initial seed funding for the press.
How we operate today
How many people do you need to publish 30-40 books a year? Next to the authors (who do the largest part of the work in the creation of a book), there are 400+ editorial board members, 600+ community proofreaders and 1800+ public supporters. These are coordinated by the LangSci office, which is run by one coordinator at 50% and 4 student assistants.
Language Science Press prizes itself on very lean and efficient workflows. Being born digital and open, a lot of legacy processes found in traditional commercial publishers are not relevant. This includes, first and foremost, paywalls, but also royalties and stockpiling. We
exclusively run open source software and are in complete control of our workflow. We have efficient toolchains and have automated our processes as far as possible. The software we create is open source as well and available for reuse on GitHub. Our first-copy costs are about 4000 EUR per title, which is less than a third of what commercial publishers would charge for an equivalent book.
Our books are typeset in LaTeX. We developed a LaTeX document class called langscibook, which is available on the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network (CTAN) and in all modern LaTeX distributions. We provide templates that make it easy for authors to start writing without having to worry about font size, margin, or spacing as this is all set automatically. For authors not well-versed in LaTeX, we offer templates in \*docx and \*odt. We set up a web service tailored for the conversion of exactly these templates into the \*tex format, which can then be loaded into Overleaf for further processing.
Our 37 series are autonomous and are led by renowned specialists in their respective fields (such as phonology or syntax for instance). They handle manuscript acquisition and peer review (at least two reviews per title). The LangSci office does not interfere with this, but serves as a hub and is available for technical advice. Once the scientific quality is established and a book is accepted, the office takes care of production and typesetting.
We see publication as a collaborative process. Authors should focus on the content, while the LangSci office takes care of more complicated elements, like tables, charts, or linguistic tree structures. Overleaf is an ideal platform for this, as several people can work on the same document, each focussing on their area of expertise.
Navigating the issue of prestige
Our authors come from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute, MIT or Berkeley. LangSci books have won many awards, including all three awards given out by the Association of Linguistic Typology. We have also won the award given by the International PhoneticAssociation several times, as well as the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, which is the highest prize you can receive in linguistics.
From the outset, our goal was to become a prestigious publisher, who could compete with the most established publishers in the field of linguistics. We called this the “Champions League”. We used a three-pronged approach of innovation, excellent typography, and “big names” in the beginning to signal and give credence to our claims. Prestige begets prestige, and once you are perceived as prestigious, people submit their best manuscripts to you, initiating a virtuous circle. Today we can say that we have achieved that goal and are already the go-to publisher in some subfields of linguistics, such as, for instance, typology and language description.
In closing, we invite you to read this interview with two prizewinning authors, Shelece Easterday and Nadine Grimm, who reflect on why they chose to publish with LangSci. In the interview, both researchers emphasize the value of publishing with LangSci, particularly its open access model. Grimm notes the importance of making research accessible to the communities whose languages are being documented, while Easterday highlights the global reach and visibility that open access provides. Both authors also describe the publication process as highly collaborative, praising the editorial and technical support that helped transform their dissertations into widely accessible books.