Congratulations to Dr. Lise Dobrin and Dr. Mark Sicoli of Department of Anthropology and Interdepartment Linguistics programs on the acquisition of the Language Documentation and Description (LDD) journal! Adding to Aperio, UVA's open-access press, students near and far are sure to benefit from the availability of this new resource and leadership. Read on for the full and official announcement, plus information about the LDD.

The editors of Language Documentation and Description are delighted to announce that the journal has moved to Aperio, the University of Virginia Library’s open-access press.

LDD publishes research articles on the theory and practice of language documentation, language description, sociocultural aspects of language use and linguistic research, language policy, language revitalization, and related topics. The journal has a focus on small, minority, and endangered languages. LDD articles are published under a Creative Commons license, with articles made freely accessible online once they have gone through production. Support is provided for linked multimedia.

The move coincides with new editorial leadership. Lise Dobrin and Mark Sicoli, both of UVA’s Department of Anthropology and Interdepartmental Linguistics Program, are joining as editors, with Dobrin serving as the new Managing Editor. 

LDD was founded in 2003 as a print journal published at SOAS in London under the editorship of Peter Austin. In 2014 the journal moved online to the EL Publishing platform established by Austin together with colleagues David Nathan and Julia Sallabank. All the current editors are staying on with the journal under the new arrangement.

UVA Library established Aperio in order to provide open-access journals led by UVA faculty with a stable and committed institutional home. It is an ideal host for LDD, which aims to make the results of documentary linguistic research freely accessible by all who might benefit, now and in the future.

Thematic and geographical listings of papers published in LDD will continue to be made available at EL Publishing, especially for LDD’s Language Snapshots and Language Contexts series. EL Publishing will continue publishing books, edited collections, and multimedia.