All Editors Quit Top Linguistics Journal To Protest Elsevier's Pricing (insidehighered.com)

Posted by Soulskill on Monday November 2, 2015 @02:23AM from the these-dominoes-will-fall-like-a-house-of-cards dept.

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?"

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Re:let them start their own by godrik · 2015-11-02 08:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

Except that there is basically nothing to develop. Everything pretty much already exist.
-you can publish the actual papers on the arxiv and only reference to them; which is common practice in physics.
-you an organize the reviews using easychair or whatever system you fancy; which we already do for most conference.
-It means that you only need to maintain a front end page which list the current issues and the papers accepted in each issue; which is precisely what we are currently doing for conferences. A journal is like having a conference every month.
And if this is really to much to take. They can still contact IEEE to get them to publish the papers, which is still significantly cheaper than Elsevier.