We, Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn, are writing to the linguistics community today to announce our resignation from our posts as the editors of the journal Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental, and Interdisciplinary Research. We are resigning to protest changes imposed unilaterally by the journal’s publisher. At the same time we are announcing the foundation of a new journal provisionally named Syntactic Theory and Research, to continue the tradition of Syntax.

Suzanne was a founding editor of Syntax, and Klaus has been her co-editor since 2013. Twenty-six years ago, Syntax was set up to facilitate timely and cutting edge reports and dialogue among colleagues in the field. We believe that Syntax has served this function well. Apart from its high standards of content, Syntax stands out, we believe, for its care and attention to detail in the presentation of complex linguistic data and analysis. It is with a heavy heart that we have come to the conclusion that our position as editors of the journal is no longer tenable. Some of the members of the journal's editorial board have joined us in resigning. In this letter, we explain our reasoning and what we see as the way forward.

We believe that there are three key ways in which a good journal adds value to scientific communication:
--Peer review ideally ensures the reliable and consistent selection of the highest-quality papers and at the same time brings about an improvement in each paper considered.
--Copyediting ensures that complex scientific ideas are communicated clearly to the widest possible audience, including when authors are nonnative users of academic English, and that the field’s standards for written work (consistent glossing and translation of examples, the Unified Style Sheet, etc.) are adhered to and exemplified.
--Professional publication ensures that material is permanently accessible, indexed, searchable by search engines, and marketed to a wide target audience.

The content of articles is provided by authors free of charge to the publisher. Working members of the field carry out peer assessment of papers free of charge to the publisher. Editors organize this process and make decisions, free of charge or with nominal compensation. It seems only fair that the academic community expects a high standard of service in the areas traditionally covered by the publisher, which we summarized above as copyediting and professional publication. Alas, the publisher of Syntax, Wiley Blackwell, recently put a team with no specialist knowledge of linguistics in charge of our editorial office. In our assessment, the new office is not up to meeting the particular challenges of dealing reliably with foreign-language character sets, glosses and gloss alignment, tree diagrams, and standardized syntactic formalism. This has ultimately led to our decision to resign effective March 31, 2024.

We are now planning to start a new journal to take the mantle of Syntax. The new journal will be "diamond open access": that is, no fees will be required to publish a paper in the journal nor to access the content. The diamond-open-access model of publishing seems to us to be not only an ethical imperative but also scientifically mandated: we cannot expect the great syntactic riches of understudied languages to be brought to bear on syntactic theory unless native speaker linguists of those languages, who may have few financial and institutional resources to rely on, have access to cutting edge research and can communicate their own findings to their colleagues around the world without having to pay publication fees.

We have settled on Syntactic Theory and Research as a working title for the new journal. The journal will be published by the Open Library of Humanities and owned in perpetuity by the community. We are call on all linguists to join us in making the new journal a success and will reach out with concrete steps soon.

Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Linguistic Theories
Psycholinguistics
Syntax