Monday, December 8, 2008

Open Access: Computational Linguistics

I’m delighted to see that one of my favorite journals, Computational Linguistics, has gone open access, not because I won’t have to pay anymore, because Thomson Reuters picks up my tab, but because there doesn’t seem to be any valid reason why students and academics should have to pay publishers to read the results of government-funded research. CL is also going all-electronic, which means that their principle costs are now editing and formatting, which they have retained MIT Press to do. These costs will be paid by their parent professional association, the Association for Computational Linguistics.

CL has maintained consistently high standards over the last 8 years, and I commend their editorial staff and reviewers for the awesome job they have done. I look forward to reading them online in future, or maybe on my Kindle one day (when that device becomes more “open”).