About

About the Journal

Language Development Research: An Open-Science Journal (ISSN 2771-7976) was established in 2021 to meet the field's need for a peer-reviewed journal that is committed to fully open science: LDR charges no fees for readers or authors, and mandates full sharing of materials, data and analysis code. The intended audience is all researchers and professionals with an interest in language development and related fields: first language acquisition; typical and atypical language development; the development of spoken, signed or written languages; second language learning; bi- and multilingualism; artificial language learning; adult psycholinguistics; computational modeling; communication in nonhuman animals etc. The journal is managed by its editorial board, and is not owned or published by any public or private company, registered charity or nonprofit organization. We invite submissions that meet our criteria for rigour, without regard to the perceived novelty or importance of the findings. We publish general and special-topic articles ("Special Collections") in a rolling format, to ensure rapid, cost-free publication for authors.

Articles are published with no embargo period, can be read without creating a user account or registering with the website, and are only available as digital files (PDF), not in print.

Contact

To contact the Ben Ambridge, the Managing Editor of LDR, please email: ldr-journal [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu

Peer Review Policy

All submissions are reviewed by a minimum of two peer reviewers, and one of our Action Editors, all well-established senior researchers, chosen to represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological expertise. Action Editors select peer reviewers on the basis of their expertise and experience in publishing papers in the relevant topic area. The journal operates a single-anonymous review policy and an optional double-anonymous review policy. That is, reviewers are anonymous to authors, unless they waive anonymity by clearly signing their review. By default, authors are not anonymous to reviewers, since the journal encourages public posting and sharing of submitted preprints, but authors may opt for double-anonymous review, in which they are additionally anonymous to reviewers.

Diamond Open Access

Language Development Research operates on a Diamond Open Access basis (also known as "Platinum" or "Universal" Open Access). That is, the journal does not charge any fees for access (e.g., subscription or download fees) or for publication (e.g., article processing charges). All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work for noncommercial purposes without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified under the terms available via the previous link to the Creative Commons website. Although authors grant first digital publication rights to LDR, and agree to publish under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, authors retain their copyright and full publishing rights.

Open Access Statement

“This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.”

Hosting

The journal is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service (LPS) which also hosts the journal editorial system via which authors submit and publish their articles. To contact, please email: librarypublishing [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu

LDR uses CLOCKSS for the long-term preservation of its content, with the support of DOAJ's JASPER initiative and the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service.

Child Language Data Exchange System

Language Development Research was founded by Ben Ambridge and Brian MacWhinney as the official journal of the Talkbank system, which comprises the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), Phonbank, Homebank, Multilingualism and Clinical banks, the CLAN software (used by hundreds of researchers worldwide to analyze children's spontaneous speech data) and the Info-CHILDES mailing list; with over 1,600 subscribers, the de-facto mailing list for the field of child language development.

Policies and Procedures 

For the complete Policies and Procedures of Language Development Research journal (ISSN 2771-7976) please follow the "Full Policies" link at the top of this page.