An integral part of VerbaAlpina is the direct and independent publication of results, since not everything that is referred to as publication serves PUBLICATION. For instance, print as an established medium causes the strict opposite: It deprives the public of information which should be accessible to the greatest possible extent, considering the research promotion through public funding, and the effortless usability of new media. The traditional 200 or 300 printed issues do not render an inclusive 'publicness', but an exclusive privacy. Thus, in the face of easily accessible information technology, there is no valid reason to prefer print or consider it the absolute mean of information distribution. Quite the contrary. The question arises why scientists should support media and institutions that systematically restrict the distribution of the results of their work.
In some academic disciplines (to our knowledge, this is true for computer science, among others), there has been an observed tendency over the past few years to lead the technological opportunities that go hand in hand with the new media ad absurdum. While world-wide access to information and texts could very easily be made obtainable, the complete opposite is the case: The data lies behind a paywall. This is even a setback from the traditional publication on paper that we have criticised above. At this point, we want to strongly warn of such developments which, to some extent, can already be observed within the humanities.
However, the concept of publication has changed substantially as well (cf. Krefeld 2019c, Chapter 3). In a broader sense, the following points are part of it:
  • linguistic object data;
  • structuring metadata;
  • linguistic text which is traditionally referred to as 'publication';
  • code and its documentation.
  • VA can hence also be regarded as an instrument for the release of project-related texts. For this, there are three designated formats:
    1. Central theoretical and methodological terms and problems are concisely filed under the tab Methodologie.
    2. More detailed analytical evaluations of project results or theoretical and/or methodological discussions can be filed under Projektpublikationen.
    3. Comments on the data visualized on the interactive online-map, like for example extralinguistic realities ('concepts') and their dialectal designations ('morpho-lexical types', 'base types'), can be opened via the 'i'-button in the map legend. They can also be accessed through the tab LexiconAlpinum. Comments can be added very easily by project members, but also by external persons.

    Comment function accessible through the map legend