Slashdot Mirror
All Editors Quit Top Linguistics Journal To Protest Elsevier's Pricing (insidehighered.com)
An anonymous reader writes: All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, have resigned. They quit to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa. "Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy. ... [Executive editor Johan Rooryck] said Lingua and most journals publish work by professors whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds. So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
This is Slashdot
Or are we talking vi vs EMACS
Oh dear. An obvious question, but not one we're supposed to ask out loud. Next thing you know someone might get to wondering what it is, exactly, that Elsevier et.al. are adding here, in terms of actual value.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
That way they can figure out was the real cost of editing and publishing both in print and online really is given the limited subscriber baser for their material. Oh. And don't forget archiving.
first post
Resume: A. Nonemus Coward
Objective: Editor of a professional journal for linguistics
Skills: Linguistics, Node.js, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, JQuery, shell scripts, multi-part tweets
Languages: English (working knowledge), Twitter (fluent)
Experience: 8+ years posting on /., reddit and digg forums
If you are an academic and want to ensure very people people see your work, then by all means publish it in an expensive journal. On the other hand, if you want to be widely recognized try putting the articles up on a web server which will probably increase the number of people looking at them by about 1000x.
I have noticed that an increasing number of authors submit to the paid journals and modify the contract to keep ownership and then put their papers up on their own web servers. When you Google for the title both the paid journal and local copy will be in the results. One you can click on and they other you can't.
I used to work for a publishing company that actually did all the publishing work for Elsevier. Both companies are total crap.
The editors quitting, together, as an act of defiance and moral outrage, lifted my heart in a way few stories ever do.
So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
Because profits!
Editors are usually professor employed by some university who do this work for free or some small compensation. In this case about 5000 EUR / year.
If others followed suit, Elsevier's business model of extortion would be crushed. Academic research shouldn't be hidden behind paywalls. Especially in those cases where it has been paid for by public funding.
Thankfully the free market will correct and simply hire new editors.
It might just be me, but $2k for an institutional license doesn't seem that steep. That's only like 22 cents a student.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Why do you think that editors are going to work for free?
Considering that Elsevier charges HEFTY fees to both, authors are readers, being free online still doen't follow that is a publication run by non-eating editors.
As HEFTY as $36 for a *one time access to a single article*, or worse? Prffft. They'll have margin to buy ferraris for everyone next year.
Maybe a world not run by crony capitalists would do better. But I'm guessing that you benefit from the existing arrangements.
Currently we have quite a lot of postdocs. If the (top) universities start taking matters in their own hands, e.g. publishing their own journals, we'd create jobs for these superfluous postdocs as journal editors. Cost wouldn't really go down, but at least the money stays where it should be. You'd have to prevent nepotism somehow, but I guess other people have ideas on that.
1. Why would government allow professors, whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds, to submit their work to closed access journals?
2. And what kind of hypocritical "educator" would be willing to submit their work to closed access journals?
Computational Linguistics is already open access, and there haven't been any reports of professors dying of starvation on the MIT campus lately.
The main problem is that scumbags like Elsevier charges extremely excessive rates to publish information (and lock it up with copyrights), most of which is produced by public money in public universities and is, by definition, public domain. The people writing the articles are often REQUIRED by contract with the university to publish their work via Elsevier who demands they sign their copyrights over. For the good of humanity this company needs to go away. Rampant greed has no place in public research.
...by buying out Slashdot and hiring on its crack staff of editors.
The quality of the output of both publishers improves radically.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It might just be me, but $2k for an institutional license doesn't seem that steep. That's only like 22 cents a student.
It's just you, most other scientific journals only cost a tiny fraction of this and Elsevier doubtless has the same amount of phony papers. If an up and coming high school student wants to see the latest research on cancer for one of his own projects he cannot afford to. Access to knowledge should not be limited just to the rich.
This is great- Elsevier and Springer (and other for-profit publishers) have been charging exorbitant prices for journals and there have been some other mass resignations where people started a free or at least affordable alternative with pretty much the same board. One of the first big ones was the journal Topology, which reconstituted itself with the exact same editorial board in a non-profit setting, described here. That was in 2006 and though I'd hoped this would spread like wildfire, it has only happened about a dozen times since then.
There are good quality affordable journals, run by professional societies or universities, which are an excellent alternative to Elsevier and other expensive for-profit journals. For the health of science, it is important that people choose to submit there. For untenured people who are under a great deal of pressure to submit to "top journals" it poses a difficult quandary, but for those of us for whom that isn't a concern, I don't see a reason to continue to support journals and publishers which have repeatedly done poorly.
The Cost of Knowledge has lots of information about efforts to improve the scientific publishing culture.
There have been other cases of prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria who resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?
In other Elsevier news, more journal shenanigans are described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions. It's not clear what the high prices of journals are paying for when there are intermittent episodes like this.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Elsevier does not pay editors, they are expected to do the work for free. (Or rather that the institution that employs them pays it.) Refusal to do free work for somebody else is perfectly reasonable thing.
Write a book review? Writing credit. Act as an editorial board for a journal? Editing credit. Do a blind peer-review for an article? Service credit. For a full time professor, these freebies are things that get listed on the CV and put into the promotion and tenure portfolio for 3-4 years down the road. It's something they jump on, because that's less original research that they have to produce. (Two published papers vs one published paper and being on the editorial board of two journals - you can bet they'll jump on #2.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Editorial Staff at the new publication Glossa have their salaries cut to 0 because there is no revenue to pay them. Staff moves to soup kitchen so they can maintain editorial control over a publication that they recognized has 0 value.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Right. The authors pay, the subscribers pay, the peer reviewers don't get paid, the editors don't get paid. The papers are typically expected to be submitted "camera ready". One might be excused if one wonders exactly what Elsevier is doing that's worth paying them.
Fuck em.
It's probably not a sexy topic, but I'd love to see one of the few remaining investigative journalists go deep and get into the business of journal publishing.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
With the Journal of Topology.
I'm delighted to see it happening again. May many more Elsevier editorial boards resign.
Once upon a time, I worked for a European telecom company. I needed a copy of some rather obscure CCITT standard for something I was working on. A paper-only copy was over $2k US$ for around 140 pages of document. Electronic versions were 'unavailable', whatever that meant. Fast forward about 25 years and things have changed only a little. The CCITT is no more (morphed into the ITU-T) but the mantra of "information is power and power should be expensive" remains there, at academic publications and in much of Europe. What is it about EU culture that propagates this model?
Elsevier is a business. The goal of a business is to make money. If their prices are too high, rather than complain about it, publish somewhere else. Or, if subscriptions are too much, don't subscribe. Authors will stop sending them papers if no one is subscribing to the journal. It's simple market economics. No one is forcing you to use Elsevier.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
revolt against corporations. Pay close attention.