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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 $1,966 for a print copy. ... [Executive editor Johan Rooryck] said Lingua and most journals publish work by professors whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds. So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
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Or are we talking vi vs EMACS
Oh dear. An obvious question, but not one we're supposed to ask out loud. Next thing you know someone might get to wondering what it is, exactly, that Elsevier et.al. are adding here, in terms of actual value.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
350$ / 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.
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'
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.
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.