For Authors

We invite you to contribute your work to the Language Description Heritage (LDH) collection.

Why should I contribute my work?

Contributing your work to the Language Description Heritage (LDH) library will benefit you in several ways:

  • It will enhance the visibility of your research so other researchers will more easily find it, acknowledge it and cite it.
  • It will ensure long-term accessibility of your work through a persistent DOI assigned by Zenodo.
  • Your work will be citable online through this DOI.
  • Content of the Language Description Heritage (LDH) library is
    • included in Glottolog and
    • harvested by OLAC
    thereby further enhancing its visibility.

To make re-use of their works easy while still ensuring proper citation, authors typically assign a Creative Commons (CC) licence to their work.

What is a CC license?

With a Creative Commons (CC) license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit – and only on the conditions you specify by choosing a particular form of the CC license.

Which CC license should I choose?

We recommend you assign a bare CC-BY (“Attribution”) license to your work, though you might also opt for the even more permissive CC0 (“No Rights Reserved”, equivalent to „Public Domain“).

There are also more restricted variants of a CC-by license, including options to ban derivatives and commercial usage. We strongly advice against banning derivatives (“No Derivatives”), though, because this would forbid any future efforts to make your work more accessible for scientific practice. Disallowing derivatives would, for example, prohibit translations and proper digitization.

In choosing a license, please be aware that there is a difference between scientific recognition and commercial recognition of your work. Whatever license you choose for your work, this does not regulate scientific recognition! Scientific recognition is organized through the (often informal) standards of scientific conduct, like proper citation and acknowledgement of your work in publication by others (cf. the “Rules of Good Scientific Practice” of the Max Planck Society). Failure to comply to these standards can only be litigated within the structure of scientific exchange, i.e. through editorial boards or scientific councils.

To obtain more scientific recognition it is best to make your work as broadly and easily available as possible, so others can find and acknowledge your work without restriction. To enhance the exchange of scientific results, we recommend you to choose a highly permissive license, like a bare CC-by („Attribution“) license.

(For a more in-depth discussion of the licensing of scientific data, see the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data

How can I contribute my work to the LDH collection?

Language Description Heritage (LDH) uses Zenodo as archive for its content. Thus, you contribute your work by uploading it to the LDH community.

You may also submit works you already uploaded to Zenodo to the LDH community, by editing the upload, adding LDH as community.

Take Down Policy

The Max Planck Society LDH Project makes every effort to ensure that it has appropriate rights to provide access to content.

In those cases where the rights are unclear (e.g., when we encounter copyright information that, relative to the work in hand, is ambiguous or contradictory), we do not provide public access to the work.

If you are a rights owner and are concerned that you have found material, for which you are the rights owner, on our website and you have not given permission, please contact us in writing stating the following:

  • your contact details
  • the full bibliographic details of the material
  • a statement that you are the rights owner or are authorised to act for the rights owner.

The material will be temporarily removed from the Language Description Heritage Website pending an agreed solution. If the contributor and the complainant are unable to agree a solution, the material will permanently removed from the website.