To: Christopher M. Tancock | Subject: Renegotiation of editorial collaboration – Lingua in Open Access | 10/7/2015

"To: Christopher M. Tancock, Senior Publisher | Language & Linguistics Journals Elsevier Ltd. | The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom

...Dear Chris,

With this letter, the editors of Lingua would like to enter into a renegotiation of their collaboration with Elsevier along the lines outlined below. To be clear, this is not a resignation or termination letter, but rather a request to Elsevier to discuss with us what future collaboration is possible.

First of all, we would like Elsevier to transfer the journal to full Open Access status. We understand that the current Article Processing Charges (APCs) at Elsevier are in the amount of 1800 euros. We believe that this amount is too high under current market conditions, and would like to ask that the APCs be lowered to a maximum of 400 euros.

Given the changing academic publishing paradigm, we also want to see the copyright in articles remaining with the authors, and consequently all copyrights in already published articles transferred back to the authors. We ask that the journal would henceforth operate under a cc- by licence.

Finally, we would like for Elsevier to transfer ownership of the journal to the collective of editors at no cost. In addition, the editors should have the right to move the journal to a different publisher with a notification of 6 months.

We see opportunities to publish a linguistics journal on the conditions outlined above, as do the editors of a number of other journals in linguistics, so the general mindset seems to be shifting to new rules. We also have financial guarantees to cover APCs for journals governed by such different rules for the first 5 years, provided by the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU), the National Foundation for Dutch Research (NWO) as well as further support from the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Netherlands (KNAW).

Our hope is that Elsevier shares our enthusiasm and will join in on the effort. We look forward to your reaction to our proposal before 16 October 2015, and would like to resolve the renegotiation by the end of October 2015 at the latest.

Yours sincerely,..."