Journal History

Linguistik online has been founded by Elke Hentschel in 1998 under the patronage of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. The foundation was not only motivated by the newly formed possibility to publish scientific findings on the internet, but also by financial reasons. The financial resources of libraries in Western Europe and in many other parts of the world were continuously shrinking, and in some parts of Eastern Europe they had become virtually non-existent. This made it difficult to impossible to keep up journal subscriptions. Under these conditions, Linguistik online set out to make the results of linguistic research available to everybody interested. This is the reason, why the journal always was, and still is, completely free of charge.

Making the results of linguistic research available naturally meant that the papers published should not represent science journalism, nor should the journal offer a publication platform for those who had no chance to publish in serious scientific journals. This meant, of course, that a board of consulting editors had to be formed. It redounds to the credit of the first consulting editors that they were willing to donate their time and their expert knowledge to the newly founded journal. Among them were Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (1943–2000),  Harald Weydt, Jürgen Trabant, and Olga Mišeska Tomić, to name but a few. Nowadays, the editorial boards comprises more than 100 linguists from all over the world, and their contribution to the quality of the papers published cannot be appreciated enough. The peer review is double blind, and every paper has to receive two positive reviews in order to be published.

While the journal was published in HTML format exclusively during the first years, additional PDFs have been offered for downloading since 2002. In this format, every issue has page numbers, as well, and can therefore be printed out and dealt with as any “normal” journal, which also makes citing easier. In 2014, the journal migrated in part to Open Journal Systems (OJS), which now makes the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers) possible.

At the beginning, Linguistik online was hosted on the university servers of the European University Viadrina and could only be found under the domain name of the university. Later, additional domains were added, at first Linguistik-online.net, Linguistik-online.org and Linguistik-online.com, later on Linguistik-online.de and Linguistik-online.ch. Apart from that, the journal was mirrored on a second server in order to make sure that it would always be accessible.  Due to a technical change at the Viadrina, where in 2010 the Unix servers were exchanged for Windows servers, there was no room for the journal there any more. Having been hosted on “its own” server only for a time, it found a new second home in 2014 at the University of Bern, where BOP (Bern Open Publishing), a platform for operating scholarly Open Access Journals, has been founded as a service of the University of Bern and part of the Open Access policy of the University of Bern.