“Beyond acquiring new publications and getting hands-on experience with scholars who do the work of publishing, this work also provides an opportunity for me to help a discipline with knowledge and resources that may be unique to our field of Library Publishing and Scholarly Communication broadly – and the capacity and resources to do that work. One such opportunity has led to one of the most meaningful projects in my career so far. I was delighted to have the opportunity to provide feedback on and early draft of the LSA’s 2018 Statement on the Evaluation of Language Documentation for Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion. This Statement cited the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in an argument that the intense data management work involved in Language Documentation projects should be viewed on par with other scholarly outputs when evaluating hiring and promotion portfolios, and gives practical advice for doing so. Based on the findings of the RPT Project from the ScholComm Lab at Simon Fraser University, open publishing and open scholarship generally are not mentioned often in Review, Promotion, or Tenure documents, and that this is a very practical barrier for scholars to engage in more open practices. After the LSA’s Statement about Language Documentation was adopted, I heard use cases where scholars and department chairs were able to effectively use this Statement to advocate for hiring and promoting linguists who devote incredible amounts of energy to the careful documentation and sharing of language data.

At this same time, some chairs of linguistics departments had become involved in a project from NASEM’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science to identify ways to encourage open scholarship in review documents. Since I had volunteered to be the Chair of the Committee on Scholarly Communication in Linguistics, I was invited to introduce representatives from the Roundtable, Greg Tananbaum and Chris Bourg, at the Department Chairs Meeting in 2020 to talk about this initiative. After their presentation, multiple linguistics department chairs mentioned the usefulness of the 2018 Statement on Language Documentation. As I sat on the sidelines and listened, I sensed the opportunity to create a Statement on the Scholarly Merit and Evaluation of Open Scholarship in Linguistics that would extend the utility of the Language Documentation Statement for all linguists who engage in Open Scholarship. I brought the idea to the committee, and members were enthusiastic about the opportunity. We worked over the next year and a half to draft a statement, conduct an open asynchronous review, make multiple rounds of edits, present at an open meeting at the 2021 Annual Meeting, and finally submit the Statement for approval of the LSA’s Executive Committee. I am proud to say that this Statement was adopted by the LSA on April 29, 2021, and you can now read it published officially on the Linguistic Society of America’s website. When you read it, you will no doubt see resources familiar to Library Publishers – including DORA, the Metrics Toolkit, NASEM’s Roundtable, and the RPT Project. These resources, although familiar to us in the Library Publishing world, are brand new to many linguists reading this Statement. And for Library Publishers, open scholarship products are often the kinds of materials we publish, whether in the form of journals, books, educational resources, datasets, or digital projects; yet our authors are often actively disincentivized from producing this kind of work by evaluation systems that privilege closed-access, traditional forms of scholarship. If we want to enrich and expand our publishing ecosystem, we must lower the barriers that scholars face when they do this work….”