Semantics of Natural Languages Open Letter
Posted by The Editors, Semantics of Natural Languages on 2026-05-19
We, the editors and former editors of Natural Language Semantics, are thrilled to announce the launch of Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL), a new diamond open access journal. SNL is the scholar-owned and scholar-led intellectual successor to Natural Language Semantics. It is published with Open Library of Humanities under the auspices of LingOA. The editors and editorial board of Natural Language Semantics are moving to SNL. Our first articles have already been accepted for publication and will appear in final form later this year. Natural Language Semantics will cease to exist later this year as an independent Springer journal.
Scope.
SNL is dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages. While SNL is firmly grounded in semantics, it welcomes contributions that draw on insights from related fields such as logic, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognition, typology, and the core domains of linguistics—provided the work is specifically directed toward linguists and advances our understanding of semantics. A central aim of SNL is to elucidate how meaning interacts with linguistic structure, while at the same time broadening the empirical foundation of semantics research beyond English. SNL values a diversity of methods and perspectives: contributions range from formal analyses and theoretical models, to experimental investigations of semantic questions, to computationally explicit implementations. Data sources include, among others, introspective judgments, fieldwork, typological studies, experimental results, computational evidence, and corpora. In addition to full-length research articles, SNL also publishes short squibs and contributions that engage with relevant books and articles through critical remarks and replies.
Diamond open access.
The creation of SNL represents a principled choice about how academic publishing should work. SNL charges no fees to readers and no fees to authors. Publication costs are sustained collectively through OLH's network of supporting libraries. Publishing with SNL is free for any researcher whose work meets its standards. The diamond open access model used by SNL offers a genuine alternative to both traditional subscription models of publishing and to gold open access. Under the former, publicly funded research is locked behind paywalls, and universities pay high fees to access work produced, reviewed, and edited by their own researchers. Gold open access merely shifts the burden: article processing charges reaching thousands of dollars per paper create a system that disadvantages scholars without access to the funding required to cover these charges.
Scholar-owned and scholar-led.
The editorial direction and governance of SNL are solely determined by members of the research community it serves. Our only mandate is to publish excellent work and make it freely available. This entails no compromise in standards: SNL maintains rigorous double-anonymous peer review and holds submissions to the highest expectations of argumentation, empirical adequacy, and formal precision.
An invitation.
We invite you to join this venture: submit your work, serve as a reviewer, and encourage your library to support OLH. In addition, we ask hiring and promotion committees to consider publication in SNL the same as they would have considered publication in NLS. The success of SNL and our field depends on collective participation—just as the advancement of diamond open access publishing does.
Signed,
The outgoing editorial team of Natural Language Semantics and incoming editorial team of Semantics of Natural Languages
Amy Rose Deal
Clemens Mayr
Florian Schwarz
The founding co-editors-in-chief, Natural Language Semantics
Irene Heim
Angelika Kratzer