1. NELS was in danger of not happening this year (budget problems everywhere dampening enthusiasm for hosting the conference?), so the MIT Linguistics department has jumped into the breach. NELS 40 will take place November 13-15, 2009 here at MIT. The abstract deadline is August 7th, 2009.
2. SALT 20 will take place at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on April 29 – May 1, 2010. Deadline for abstract submission: Dec. 1, 2009.

The pleasure and importance of printed journals

Sir

I am shocked to read in Nature News online that the American Chemical Society intends to stop all personal subscriptions to its printed journals by 2010, and to start introducing major changes this year (‘Chemistry publisher moving towards online-only journals’).

The attractive printed versions of Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Organic Chemistry, Accounts of Chemical Research and Organic Letters provide distinct advantages in letting me browse their content (during breakfast at home, for example) and readily take in information, without the lengthy opening of individual web pages, article by article.

But I also find this decision to stop the print journals disturbing in my capacity as a board member of the German chemical society, the GDCh, and as head of the editorial board of the journal Angewandte Chemie. I believe that high-quality journals such as Nature and Science and, in chemistry, Angewandte Chemie and Journal of the American Chemical Society should continue to appear in all their published formats, including print. Otherwise, there is a risk that the quality of these prestigious journals could gradually decline to the standard of many of today’s web-only journals.

François Diederich, Laboratorium für Organische Chemie, ETH-Zürich

doi:10.1038/460033c

Along the same lines, I firmly believe that there was a significant decline in the quality of scientific discourse when we moved from stone tablets to papyrus and onwards.

Are you a Friend of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? So many of us — students, academics, interested readers — use it for our research, and it’s a great resource for everyone. If you’re a regular user of the SEP (and if you’re interested in philosophy, who wouldn’t be?), consider joining the Friends of the SEP Society to help support the work of the Encyclopedia. For a small fee, you support the encyclopedia, you help it keep up its mission of free, high quality introductions to philosophical themes — and you get access to great quality PDF versions of the entries in the SEP, which are just ideal for printing out and reading (and annotating) offline. You also (if you like) get email notifications whenever the articles you’ve downloaded get updated. It’s a good deal, and it’s much cheaper (at $25 a year for a full subscription, down to $5 a year for a student subscription) than a journal subscription.

Now that academics everywhere are throwing off the shackles of teaching obligations for the summer, why don’t you join the open access revolution and submit your next great paper to S&P? It’s easy and you will benefit from the highest quality reviewing and editing anywhere.

“Gauss, who hadn’t been listening up till now, asked the diplomat to repeat his name.

The diplomat bowed and did so. He too was a scientist!

Curious, Gauss leant forward.

He researched old languages.

Ah, said Gauss.

That, said the diplomat, sounded rather disappointed.

Linguistics. Gauss shook his head. He didn’t wish to be offensive.

No, no. He should say it.

Gauss shrugged. Linguistics was for people who had the precision for mathematics but not the intelligence. People who would invent their own makeshift logic.

The diplomat was silent.

Gauss asked him about his travels. He must have been everywhere!

That, said the diplomat, sourly, was the other von Humboldt, his brother. A case of mistaken identity, and not the first time it had happened. He said goodbye and left with small steps.”

Yesterday afternoon, the MIT Faculty voted unanimously in favor of an Open Access Policy. All scholarly articles written by MIT Faculty from now on will come with a non-exclusive license that allows MIT to make the author’s final preprint openly accessible. Here is the text:

MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy:

Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.

To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office.

The Provost’s Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.

The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.

The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible.

Hal Abelson and Ann Wolpert, Director of the MIT Libraries, co-chaired the committee that crafted the policy. I was a member of that committee and I am very proud of what MIT is doing.

[Thanks to Emma for the tip.]

[Brief Update: Hmm, they don't have the last two issues (1976, Volume 14). The last issue has Benny Shanon's short squib, which is the source for the Hey, wait a minute! test for presuppositions. It would have been nice to have the official pdf of that.]

The problem is that I signed a publication agreement (imposed by Blackwell, or rather their overlords, Wiley) that gives me the right to share the preprint of the article with colleagues except that I can’t put it online until 24 (!) months after publication:

That’s really unacceptable and I should not have accepted it. So, here’s my public pledge: I will not publish under any agreement in the future that doesn’t allow me to share (at least) the preprint freely online.

Unfortunately, since I’m the editor of the open-access journal Semantics and Pragmatics, I can’t go to the ideal situation myself yet (until someone starts an open-access competitor to our journal). But you can! Please submit your best work to open access journals so that we can get rid of these kinds of impediments to free scientific communication.

Call for papers: ESSLLI Workshop on Presuppositions

The last ten years has seen a wealth of new developments on the topic of presupposition and, in particular, the projection problem for presupposition. While there had been considerable interest in the seventies in developing entirely pragmatic accounts of presupposition triggering and projection (Wilson, 1974, Stalnaker 1977, Grice, 1981), these accounts had generally not been sufficiently developed to match the dynamic accounts developed in the eighties in predictive power. Recent work, such as that of Schlenker (2006, 2008), however, has shown that broadly pragmatic accounts can also have considerable predictive power. In addition, trivalent approaches based on such techniques as supervaluations and the Strong Kleene connectives, which were dismissed by many long ago, have recently attracted new interest (Beaver and Krahmer, 2001, George, 2008, Fox, 2008) and have been shown capable of handling many empirical issues in presupposition projection. Thus there is no longer a clear consensus on how we should explain presupposition projection. In addition, experimental work has raised interesting questions about what the basic facts of presupposition projection are and suggests that real empirical work is needed to determine some of the subtleties (Chemla 2007). There has also been renewed interest in the triggering problem (Simons, 2001, Abusch, 2002) which naturally links up to the projection problem, as well as recent theoretical work on foundational issues such as the notion of common ground and accommodation (Beaver and Zeevat, 2004, von Fintel, 2001, 2006, Stalnaker, 2002). The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers on presupposition to discuss these new developments and connect some of the different theoretical and empirical questions, which are too often considered in isolation.

We invite submission of abstracts from linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists, addressing formal or foundational issues about theories of presupposition, or offering new empirical perspectives that bear on them. We especially encourage papers that address questions about the explanatory depth of different theories or the triggering problem, or introduce new forms of experimental or empirical evidence relevant to adjudicating between theories of presupposition.

workshop organizers<br/> – Nathan Klinedinst (UCL)<br/> – Daniel Rothschild (Columbia)

Invited Speakers:<br/> – Hans Kamp (Stuttgart)<br/> – Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean Nicod/NYU)<br/> – Henk Zeevat (University of Amsterdam)

Submission Details:<br/> Authors are invited to submit an anonymous, extended abstract. Submissions should not exceed 2 pages, including references. Please email your submission in PDF format to presupposition.esslli2009 AT gmail.com. Abstracts will be anonymously reviewed by the program committee.

Workshop Format:<br/> The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the second week of ESSLLI. There will be 2-3 slots for paper presentation and discussion per session.

Timeline:<br/> Submission Deadline: Febuary 15, 2009<br/> Notification: April 1, 2009<br/> Preliminary program: April 24, 2009<br/> ESSLLI early registration deadline: April 15, 2009<br/> Final papers for proceedings: June 1, 2009<br/> Final program: June 19, 2009<br/> Workshop dates: July 27-31, 2009

Practical Information:<br/> All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee.

Further Information about ESSLLI: http://esslli2009.labri.fr/