Language Science Press is the leading diamond open-access book publisher in linguistics. Founded in 2014 in Berlin by Stefan Müller and Martin Haspelmath - growing out of the Open Access in Linguistics initiative launched in 2012 - it publishes scholar-led monographs, reference grammars, edited volumes, and textbooks covering every subfield of linguistics. As of August 2026 the catalog lists 385 titles across 38 series, with roughly 30 new books appearing each year, written by more than 1,400 linguists.

What makes Language Science Press unusual is its funding model. There are no publication fees for authors and no charges for readers: every book is free to download as a PDF under a CC BY license, and printed copies are available at cost via print-on-demand. Operational costs are met by a network of 115 supporting institutions - university libraries and research organisations that jointly underwrite the press - together with a community of 550+ series editors and 500+ volunteer proofreaders. This is diamond (also called platinum) open access in its purest form.

Note that Language Science Press publishes books only. It does not run journals, so if you are looking for a linguistics journal you will need a different venue; this guide covers how to publish a book with the press.

Every book appears in one of 38 topical series, each run by its own series editors. Choosing the right series is the first and most important submission decision.

The press publishes scholarly linguistics only: research monographs, reference grammars, edited volumes, conference proceedings, text collections, and textbooks. It explicitly does not publish books for the general reader, festschrifts, unrevised dissertations, autobiography, or fiction. Books appear in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or Chinese. Notable series include Studies in Diversity Linguistics (33 books), Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing (26), Textbooks in Language Sciences (19), and the Comprehensive Grammar Library of full-length reference grammars.

Authors retain copyright. Because there are no fees for anyone, waiver programs are unnecessary - the model is equally open to authors in low- and middle-income countries.

Every manuscript is reviewed by at least two reviewers selected by the relevant series editors; the press lists double-anonymized review as its standard model. Accepted manuscripts then go through an unusual second stage: community proofreading, in which volunteer linguists from a pool of 500+ read and correct the text via a public proofreading queue. A final typographic review precedes publication. The result is a review pipeline comparable in rigor to traditional university presses, with added community quality control.

1. Pick a series. Browse the 38 series and identify the best fit for your manuscript.
2. Contact the series editors. Submission runs through series editors, who discuss scope and fit before formal review.
3. Prepare in LaTeX. Language Science Press uses a LaTeX-based production workflow; templates and guidelines (the LangSci guidelines and the Generic Style Rules for Linguistics) are on GitHub, and book templates are available on SciSpace.
4. Follow the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics for citations and references.
5. Go through review, community proofreading, and typographic review before your book is published with a DOI, free PDF, and print-on-demand edition.

Books carry DOIs and standard bibliographic metadata, so cite them as you would any scholarly monograph - in linguistics, typically using the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics: author, year, title, Berlin: Language Science Press, plus the DOI. Because PDFs are open, page-level citations are verifiable by any reader.

Language Science Press follows standard scholarly publishing ethics; the catalog lists it as a COPE and OASPA member, and its scholar-led governance (a 13-member advisory board and named series editors) keeps editorial decisions in the hands of working linguists. Its open books, open source workflow, and transparent funding reports have made it a widely cited model for fair open-access book publishing.