Just launched: Semantics of Natural Languages! It's a linguistics journal! It has some great papers accepted already! And no that's not all, it also has

In 2026, when you're sending a paper to an academic journal, the journal is probably owned by one of several international media corporations. That corporation is trying to make money, and is doing a very good job--Springer Nature most recently announced a profit margin of 28%, and profit margins in the 30%ish range are not unusual in the academic publishing industry.

But in our market economy it is not enough to make huge profits. You also have to grow. So the super profitable company that owns the journal to which you're submitting your paper has been testing out different ways to squeeze more money out of its academic publishing business. It used to be that they made their money by charging subscription fees to academic libraries, so they tried hiking those fees. That led to something called the serials crisis, which is why your library probably doesn't have every journal or handbook you want. Then, with the pivot to open access publication (itself sometimes pitched as the solution to the serials crisis), the very profitable companies realized there was a lot of money to be made in the fees that authors pay to publish open access (Author Publication Charges, or APCs). One way to play it is to increase APCs over time, e.g. at three times the rate of inflation. The other obvious move is just to publish more open access papers. Want to increase the profitability of Journal X? Let's just double the number of papers Journal X publishes every year.

There is a problem with this, which is that academics think that work that is published in journals is supposed to be good. Especially: work published in good journals is supposed to be good. That is why you send your paper to a good journal: you want the good journal to attest to the goodness of your good paper, in the eyes of those who know and care what papers are good. Now obviously all of your work is good, but certainly not all work done by everyone in the field is good all the time. You wouldn't want good journals to start willy-nilly publishing all kinds of everything that comes across the editor's desk, because that would involve publishing lots of that less-than-good work that other people always seem to be doing, and that would mean that the journal would lose its ability to signal goodness by what it publishes.

So here we have the basic problem. The very profitable corporate publisher wants the journal to publish more papers, because then they get paid more in APCs. Such papers could be haikus, casserole recipes, AI slop for all they care. But the actual community of users of the journal—the people who use it to share their work, discover the work of others, and signal to each other what is good—want the journal to publish only good papers, which sadly exist in this world in limited quantity and cannot be freely substituted for haikus, casserole recipes, or even (alas!) AI slop.

I cannot tell you how journal editors in general are currently solving this problem (though I am sure they are currently facing it).¹ But I can tell you how we solved it at Natural Language Semantics. In the face of an ultimatum to publish more papers or else, we (Clemens Mayr, Florian Schwarz, and me) discussed what we thought was valuable and unique about our journal. The fact that it was published by Springer Nature did not make the list. So we decided to take what is valuable and unique about NLS and set it free. That meant picking a new name, because Springer Nature owns the legal name "Natural Language Semantics" and technically can do whatever the heck they want with that name. It meant finding a new publisher that was aligned with the vision of a journal that really only exists to publish work that is good. Shout out to Johan Rooryck, who is a visionary, and to Open Library of Humanities, for giving us a new home for semantics research that is "for free, for everyone, for ever." Long live Semantics of Natural Languages!

I'm sure you've come across that quote in recent years, what with <gestures around>: “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”? Yeah, this is not one of those situations. It is true that the old world of corporate journals is dying (or being enshittified on the way to dying). The new world, though? It's going kind of great.

Ten years ago, walking away from a legacy journal with a corporate publisher in favor of a new scholar-owned alternative sounded risky. It doesn't anymore. We are fortunate in linguistics: Glossa has shown us the way, and Semantics and Pragmatics, and STAR, and many more. Our community has shown that "we can shift academic culture through publishing choices" (Logan 2017—props to them for making that the actual title of their paper). We can have nice things.

Editors: read your contract. Does it say you can quit? Mine did (with 6 months notice, sure). Maybe think about asking your editorial board what they would think of making the jump. (Ours at NLS was strongly in favor.) Other people know way more than me about all of this, but if I can help you in some way with thinking about the transition, I'd be more than happy to share what I know.

Very junior people, people employed in places where journal metrics matter: watch this happen, but not worry about it. This is not your fight. Junior people, send good work to good journals. People stuck in metrics-obsessed places, do what you need to do to appease the metrics overlords. It will be ok.

Everyone else: I'll tell you what I am doing — starting immediately, for one year, I'm saying no to bad publishers, even when they come in the guise of good journals. I won't be submitting to or reviewing for journals published by for-profits.

Why for one year? Because I want a clearly delineated test period after which I can report on how it went.

Honestly, I don't expect this to be hard. Among general-ish linguistics journals, this leaves contenders such as Language (Cambridge University Press), Linguistic Inquiry (MIT Press), and of course Glossa (Open Library of Humanities). Syntacticians like to publish in those journals and also have STAR (Open Library of Humanities) as an option. In semantics, I'm taking SNL off my personal list due to editorial conflict of interest, but that still leaves Semantics and Pragmatics (LSA), Journal of Semantics (Oxford University Press), and the new diamond OA option Meaning (Ruhr University Bochum). This is not a short list!

So—colleagues—won't you join me?? Even if you don’t think you can commit to it for a full year (which is not that long though), what about trying it for a single paper, the next one you send to a journal? Maybe Journal X is the natural choice for your paper in a world where we don’t care about bad publishers. But here’s Journal Y also wanting to publish your good work, and not to make a profit off of it, but rather for the research community you are a part of. If you’re a semanticist, why not SNL? If you’re not, why not one of the non-corporate journals in your field?