My friend Jason Jackson passes on the news that at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, the following resolution was passed:
Whereas modern computing technology has the potential of advancing linguistic science by enabling linguists to work with datasets at a scale previously unimaginable; and
Whereas this will only be possible if such data are made available and standards ensuring interoperability are followed; and
Whereas data collected, curated, and annotated by linguists forms the empirical base of our field; …
Therefore, be it resolved at the annual business meeting on 8 January 2010 that the Linguistic Society of America encourages members and other working linguists to:
- make the full data sets behind publications available, subject to all relevant ethical and legal concerns; …
- work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic databases and computational tools; and
- when serving as reviewers, expect full data sets to be published (again subject to legal and ethical considerations) and expect claims to be tested against relevant publicly available datasets.
