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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 $1,966 for a print copy. ... [Executive editor Johan Rooryck] said Lingua and most journals publish work by professors whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds. So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
This is Slashdot
Or are we talking vi vs EMACS
Oh dear. An obvious question, but not one we're supposed to ask out loud. Next thing you know someone might get to wondering what it is, exactly, that Elsevier et.al. are adding here, in terms of actual value.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
350$ / 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.
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.
A whole 22 cents per person per year for a subscription. Very expensive.
It is when you consider that you're paying that for every member of faculty and every student. Not just those in the linguistic department. Those other departments need their own subscriptions. Before you know, you're spending tens - even hundreds - of thousands of dollars on subscriptions.
Given that the publisher doesn't pay for the articles, the peer review or the editing (for the most part), it does raise the question, what exactly is being paid for via those subscriptions.
"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'
There's also the excellent arXiv.org which is used by a lot of scientists. More fields should have something like that.
...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.
What you can do legally, at least with Springer journals, is to put a "preprint"/draft version on your web site, and I've seen a neat trick recently. Somebody has put the page numbers of the printed publication in squared brackets into his drafts so people can cite his papers without having the "official" publication.
I'll do that with all my online papers. :-)
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/).
In my research fields, reviews and editorial boards do not carry the weight of research publications-- not remotely. It may vary by discipline, etc. A research article in a weak journal or without much content carries less weight than a good result, and being on some editorial board can carry some weight but it's unlikely a weak candidate for tenure or promotion would be on a the board of a good journal. Reviews should be done but people get very little credit for that. Generally, people don't even quantify how much reviewing they do; they just mention the journals that they've been asked to review for.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
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'
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
A whole 22 cents per person per year for a subscription. Very expensive.
It is when you consider that you're paying that for every member of faculty and every student. Not just those in the linguistic department. Those other departments need their own subscriptions. Before you know, you're spending tens - even hundreds - of thousands of dollars on subscriptions.
Um, either a subscription by a library covers all students in an institution, as your first sentence asserts, or it only covers the ones in a given department, as your second and third sentence assert. If the first one is true, the second and third are false.
$3k for a top-notch journal just isn't that much when subscription costs are often in the $10-20k range for other journals.
I do not dispute that publishers make scads of money. I take no stance on whether that money is deserved for the value they provide. The idea, however, that open source publishing can somehow erase all costs is pure delusional fantasy. Publishing can be made to be not-for-profit, but that is no where near the same as free. It costs money to run the journal, and that's beyond just hosting fees. You need a staff, and each person costs on order of $100k in total budget (salary, benefits, overhead). A journal that publishes twelve issues per year needs a full-time staff of six people, exclusive of the editorial board. That money has to come from somewhere. I publish a biennial journal (once every 2 years), and I do it largely on my own in addition to my other responsibilities, which what I base the 6-people estimate upon. What do these people do? Manage the web site, manage the submission process, copy edit accepted manuscripts, typeset accepted manuscripts, fix problems with figures, layout the journal, solicit and manage advertising/grants, make sure that everything is backed up, make sure the payment processing is PCI compliant, manage the business, etc. (If you think that authors can handle the copy editing, typesetting, etc., then you're going to end up with a publication that looks like it was put together by my six year old, won't get read, and won't get referenced. Trust me, I tried that with the first issue of the journal I publish.)
So, if we assume that an annual $600k needs to come from somewhere, there are really only two sources: the submitters and the readers. The traditional model is that readers pay a subscription fee, and submitters pay almost nothing. The open-access model moves the burden from the readers to the submitters, who now need to pay thousands of dollars per published article (12 issues of 10 articles each means $5k per published article). Either way, the money has to come from somewhere. Publishing is not free.
Again, it is entirely possible that the large publishing houses are making a profit that is obscene. I make no assertions on that. But thinking that the costs can go to nearly zero and indefinitely maintain the same level of quality is naive.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
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.
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.
He's not saying that other departments need separate subscriptions to this journal, but that they have their own journals they need to pay for as well. So in the end you are talking about hundreds of these fees accumulating for each student regardless of who is using the resource.