I was the Executive Editor of Lingua from 1999 to 2015.
 

Lingua was ranked 7th in Google Scholar’s h5-Index Top Publications – Humanities, Literature & Arts, and 3rd in the subsection Language & Linguistics in October 2015, when its 6 editors and the 31 member editorial board resigned after Elsevier's rejection of the editors’ request to publish Lingua under conditions of Fair Open Access.
 

The editorial team and board then went on to found the Fair Open Access journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, published by Ubiquity Press with financial support for Author Processing Charges from LingOA and the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH).
 

The transition from Lingua to Glossa was extensively covered in the national and international media and endorsed by various organisations. 

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Since Elsevier has systematically distorted the facts about the transition and my role in it, I have posted the complete correspondence with Elsevier about this topic here.

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Interaction with Elsevier

The 2017 Elsevier campaign

1. My point-by-point, fact-checking-style refutation of allegations made by Elsevier's Executive Publisher Chris Pringle about the Lingua/ Glossa transition in mails (e.g. 3 and 4 below) written to invited Lingua reviewers who decline to do reviews because of the transition to Glossa.

2. My correspondence with Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) regarding his message to Reviewer 2, 8 August 2017.

3. Mail from Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) to Declining Lingua Reviewer 2.

4. Mail from Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) to Declining Lingua Reviewer 1.

5. An attempt to rewrite history in an editorial by Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) for the publisher in Lingua 194 (July 2017), and my Facebook reply to it.

6. My refutation of claims made at ARCL 2017 regarding Elsevier's APC proposal to the Lingua editors.

October–November 2015

1. My mail to Elsevier of 5 November 2015, requesting rectification of Tom Reller's (Vice President and Head of Global Corporate Relations, Elsevier) public statement about the resignation of the Lingua editorial board on 4 November 2015.

2. The correspondence about the Lingua Editorial Board's collective resignation between Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, for the Board, and Chris Tancock (Senior Publisher, Elsevier), 27 October 2015.

3. My letter of resignation of 26 October 2015. The other editors sent similar letters.

4. Elsevier's response of 16 October 2015, signed by Chris Tancock (Senior Publisher, Elsevier) to the Lingua editorial team's letter of renegotiation of 7 October 2015.

5. Mail correspondence with David Clark, Senior Vice President, Elsevier, of 16 October 2015, following up on our meeting at the European Commission Workshop Alternative Open Access Publishing Models: Exploring New Territories in Scholarly Communication. Brussels, 12 October 2015.

6. The Lingua editorial team's letter of renegotiation to Elsevier to publish Lingua in Open Access on (what is now known as) Fair Open Access Principles, 7 October 2015.