In October 2015 the editors and editorial board resigned en masse to protest their inability to come to an agreement with Elsevier regarding fair pricing models for open access publishing.

They subsequently started a new journal, Glossa since Elsevier refused to relinquish the rights on the name Lingua.

Elsevier's continuation is referred to (by some linguists) as Zombie Lingua and is regarded as a new journal.

[1][3][4][5] Following a statement from their linguistics faculties, the University of California Libraries requested that Elsevier cancel their subscription to post-2015 volumes of Lingua.

[6] In a joint post on Language Log in 2016, Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel noted lower quality standards at the new Lingua which included a paper withdrawn due to plagiarism.