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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 $1,966 for a print copy. ... [Executive editor Johan Rooryck] said Lingua and most journals publish work by professors whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds. So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
This is Slashdot
Or are we talking vi vs EMACS
Oh dear. An obvious question, but not one we're supposed to ask out loud. Next thing you know someone might get to wondering what it is, exactly, that Elsevier et.al. are adding here, in terms of actual value.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
If you are an academic and want to ensure very people people see your work, then by all means publish it in an expensive journal. On the other hand, if you want to be widely recognized try putting the articles up on a web server which will probably increase the number of people looking at them by about 1000x.
I have noticed that an increasing number of authors submit to the paid journals and modify the contract to keep ownership and then put their papers up on their own web servers. When you Google for the title both the paid journal and local copy will be in the results. One you can click on and they other you can't.
I used to work for a publishing company that actually did all the publishing work for Elsevier. Both companies are total crap.
350$ / year for a small open access journal if you don't print.
https://www.martineve.com/2012...
The editors quitting, together, as an act of defiance and moral outrage, lifted my heart in a way few stories ever do.
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.
The statement in the write-up, claiming, the new publication will be accessible for free. Maybe, they'll sell advertising or, as Uecker suggests, they all have day-jobs at colleges anyway and this editing is only a hobby for them.
Elsevier may be charging whatever, but that's no longer relevant, because the people being discussed have quit it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"let them start their own"
Well, yes. That's precisely what they've said they're going to do, and given that they are all remarkably intelligent people, I think they've already done the sums on the hosting costs. They certainly know how much time is involved in it, seeing as how they've been doing that exact job for years.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I'll disagree with this. As someone who's spent a fair amount of time in both academia and industry, it's always shocking how little the academic side understands the true cost of things. So much in that world is paid for indirectly via the institution or someone else's grants (for instance, most university supercomputing resources are paid for by grants that the end users are never involved with). On top of that, academic labor is very cheap. Grad students and post-docs typically cost a quarter of their counterparts in industry.
The "best" path forward they have is to use grant-funded university computing resources to host the journals and grad student labor to maintain the infrastructure. This takes away the computing resources from their stated goal as research resources. You could claim that hosting research papers is a legitimate use, but given that there's no research value in developing the software for an open access journal (every publisher has something like this and PLOS does it too - there's nothing novel about it), this isn't research.
More importantly, using academic labor for this undermines the careers of those academics. Grad students and post-docs should be advancing their research careers, not developing and maintaining software infrastructure. This is abuse, plain and simple.
So, in protesting fees that basically cover the cost of managing journals and infrastructures, the academics will shift the infrastructure and labor costs to themselves. This will compromise their ability to do research (there are only so many hours in the day) and lead to an inferior product (grad students are not qualified to manage complex, production software projects).
I'll agree that we need a new model in publishing, but this isn't it.
-Chris
...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.
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.
Real world right now is that elsevier uses free labor of editors and scientists while asking tons of money for the result of their work. It works, because real world institutions require their scientists to publish in journals with biggest impact - which means that individual scientists can not choose different journal without harming his career. Which means that there is no real market competition and the only way out of the situation is coordinate action of scientists.
Academic publishing has largest margins within printing industry. Don't tell me they need both free labor and the prices they charge - if it would be result of necessity, Elevier margins would be much lower.
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.
First of all, no one said anything about free. Talk is cheap. These people are taking action.
This is not the audience demanding content for free. These editors realize that the actual articles are being paid for by tax dollar and should allow open access. They tried to reason with Elesevier but Elesevier would not budge on the point. They then took action, they all resigned and have started their own open access journal. At this point they can operate a a non-profit and do all the editing as willing donations of their time or they can charge for accepting articles.
The people who would be reading this Journals wold not be Freetards. Those articles are paid for by the tax dollars of the readership. The articles that are not paid for by tax dollars have authors that made a decision. They had a choice of publishing in the gated and expensive Elesevier Journal or in the Open Journal. Even though publishing in either journal would have a cost to them. The authors chose to publish in the Open Journal.
That is how the free market works
vi +
Yes. For most (or all?) open access you pay when you want to get something published. Just paid over £1000 for one article, so I guess this is not cheap either.
While the free mass market can bulldoze through with more marketing, in the realm of journals, reputation is everything. Anyone in the field will understand that Lingua has become a different journal overnight, and the editors will take their well-earned reputations with them to Glossa.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Producing a professional glossy is expensive, so don't. Let the libraries print it out to get a paper copy and accept that the index and cover are barebones.
Commercial publishers charge what maximizes the profits not "fees that basically cover the cost of managing journals and infrastructures".
Those Journals and infrastructures are also optimized for their profit, not for their academic usefulness. They produce journals far more elaborately than what the audience really needs, is that luxury worthwhile? On the one hand it adds prestige and academics is all about prestige, on the other hand the names of the editor add far more prestige than glossy. DRM and copyright enforcement adds cost as well.
There are perverse incentives in scientific publishing, in the end only actions like this can provide the necessary push back against those incentives. So that in the future they truly will just charge fees that basically cover the cost of managing academically useful journals and infrastructures and a healthy margin. But that probably won't be the billion dollar business they are in now ...
Why comment on something you know nothing about?
Editors of academic journals are generally professors at a university. They are typically not paid by the journal. They act as editors as a service to their academic community.
The papers that appear in Elsevier journals are not written by Elsevier, and not paid for by Elsevier. The editing is not done by Elsevier, and not paid for by Elsevier. Elsevier is essentially charging extortionate prices for a product produced for free by other people. It's somewhat questionable exactly what service *any* academic publisher in the Internet age is providing, but it's especially egregious in the case of Elsevier because of their pricing and other policies.
This is by far not the first action professors have taken against Elsevier.
The editors of the journal Topology resigned 9 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)). The new open access journal they founded is doing fine.
Many mathematicians are boycotting Elsevier journals (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier-boycott-one-year-on/).
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.
Elsevier have run through the market acquiring the most prestigious journals with the express intention of achieving a near monopoly and the opportunity to milk the universities with ever higher fees. As I said, the guys doing this have years of experience in academic publishing -- I'll trust their judgement, thanks.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Are those extremely intelligent people who've been reviewing and editing professional journals for many years? Because I think these guys have a fairly good idea how journal publishing works by now.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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
I'm not defending Elsevier's business practice, but I'm pointing out that your trust in academic's experience is misplaced. While academics serve on the editorial boards, they aren't involved in the day-to-day business of the journals and privy to all it takes to manage one. Their job as editors is selecting research for review and publication, not managing its actual publication.
I have friends on the editorial boards of these journals. They're great researchers, but they are in no way qualified to be managing the operational aspects of disseminating research. And even if they could, is that really the best use of their time and resources?
-Chris
As insiders, they probably know the real cost of all this stuff.
Well, you can totally tag along the arxiv for the main storage and only have journals that refer to arxiv submission. That would get the storage cost virtually down to 0.
For a no-frills open-access journal, the cost is tiny. Depending on how much they want to borrow from their institutions, the number is somewhere between $10 and $1000 per year. The top end of this is about half of a single typical professor's "Professional Expense Allowance". Or each of the editorial board members could cough up somewhere between $0.33 and $33.33 per year. How do I know? Because I've been doing this for six years. http://jocg.org/
Ha ha, cost of "archiving", LOL. Good one. They could put it on github pages for all I care. Sometimes, the cloud can be a good thing, you know. If someone wants it in print, they can get it printed at any on-demand printer they choose. The library/university should be able to deal with that cheaply and effectively.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Hosting is free. Nobody should really be paying for that anymore. For an open access journal, github pages is all you need, really.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
This is nice strawman. You make up a nice story how the academics will misuse money from unrelated grants to pay for this and then argue that this is unethical. But of course, there are many other legitimate ways to fund this project and there is no indication whatsoever that this specific project will get funded in a questionable way. And no, where I have worked I have never seen how money from grants has been spent for entirely unrelated projects - and I seriously doubt that any supercomputer has been paid for from misappropriated grant money. When I order something from the grants I have, an admin makes sure that this is actually covered by the original grant application. Even if the admin would let it slip through, there are internal audits which would catch this.
"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"
Yeah, not really sure why Elsevier wouldn't want to convert to open access. That's about what they charge per article at OA journals.
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.
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?
I do not publish in Elsevier journals, nor do I ever accept 'invitations' to referee articles submitted to any Elsevier publication.
This has been my policy since the late 1990's.
Signed,
A physical scientist
Are you trying to say academics know nothing about books and journals?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I didn't read that from what he wrote.
I read that working in/for an organization is much different than running that organization.
revolt against corporations. Pay close attention.
That figure is vastly underestimated. It does not account for any human time, either in technical administration or copy editing and proofing. Hosting at a shared host? Are you kidding? The chosen archiving 'solution' strikes me as abusive of original author copyright but regardless, who is doing the day to day backups? Where are they stored? Who is doing restoration? What happens when free helpers leave? Get sick?
This type of setup may be appropriate for something in-house, like a departmental journal but I think it fails on many levels when it comes to the requirements of the real world. I shudder to think of something like Physical Review being run this way.
RELX, the parent holding company in 2014 had revenues of 5.77B euros and net profit of 955M euros - 16.5%. That includes all lines and overhead. In the segment breakout, Sci/Tech/Med revenue was 2.048B euro w/ adjusted operating (not net) profit of 762M, 37.2%
Those figures are hadly that of an abusive monopoly.