Apart from academic libraries that are reacting to the high cost of journal access, there are indications that academics on some journal editorial boards are also protesting by resigning en masse to start rival journals. I identified and discussed six cases of such resignations of editorial board members in protest of the unfair pricing model by publishers in this blog post.
The oldest case was reported in 1999 when 50 of the Journal of Logic Programming (JLP) editorial board of Elsevier resigned1 from their positions after 16 months of negotiating with Elsevier on the high subscription cost to the journal’s full text. A new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), was created with Cambridge University Press.
Another case was reported in 2000, by the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) editorial board members that resigned because they were against the expensive subscription cost to the journal’s full text2. At the time, the yearly institutional subscription to JMR was $1050 while individuals had to pay $120. The editorial board members also protested against the distribution of revenue from the journals which never got to the authors. in the spring of 2000, 40 members of the editorial board resigned to start a new journal named Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) with MIT publishers. In a bid to actualize their dream of fairness to authors, authors of JMLR articles were allowed to retain the copyright of their works.
In 2003, the entire editorial board Journal of Algorithms resigned 3 to start Transactions on Algorithms (TALG) with Association for Computer Machinery due to the pricing policies of Elsevier Publisher. The editorial board members were worried their journal would not reach the necessary audience because of the high subscription cost to the journals as imposed by the publisher.
One of the high profile cases of such imbroglio is that of Lingua (An International Review of General Linguistics), a linguistics journal by Elsevier publisher. All the members of the editorial board of Lingua resigned in October 2015 after Elsevier declined the request by the journal board for a fair open access pricing model. According to Samson (2015), the board members negotiated with Elsevier for a fair open access pricing “that would see the journal’s article processing fees charged to authors slashed by more than 75 per cent (from €1,800 to €400)”. The move for fair open access pricing was endorsed by the Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. A parallel linguistics journal, named Glossa (a journal of general linguistics) and published by Ubiquity Press, was created by the editorial board in compliance with the fair open access pricing model.
In a related development, the four editors-in-chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics that is published by Springer Science+Business Media resigned from their positions in 2017 to start Algebraic Combinatorics, a parallel journal. Like glossa, the disagreement between the editorial board and the publisher stemmed from the publisher’s refusal to adopt a fair open access pricing model. Algebraic Combinatorics is published by the Centre Mersenne in compliance with the fair open access pricing model.
Journal of Infometrics (JOI) editors resigned in 2019 to start Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) because of the unethical and unfair practices of Elsevier. The quest for profits at the expense of ethical, fair and sustainable publishing practices drove the partnership between Elsevier and JOI editorial board aground and this led to the collective resignation of the editorial board members. In Waltman et al., (2020) words “The financial model of Elsevier has become untenable for the scientific community and, we argue, in violation of the scientific ethos. Its excessive subscription fees have caused journal cancellations across the globe—from California to Germany (SPARC, 2020)—and Elsevier’s article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing (currently USD 2000 at JOI) do not represent a fair value for the cost. Publishing with Elsevier inevitably places major limits on scholarship: The expense of the subscription model places a restriction on who can be a reader of science, the expense of APCs restricts who can be an author. These restrictions on access are harmful to science and society.”, an indication that the interest of Elsevier is driven by profit, not science.
The mass resignation of editorial board members of some journals is one of the types of responses from academia against the unfair profit-driven attitude of the big publishers. Libraries are also responding by cancelling their “big deals”, and finding means of accessing publishers resources in an affordable manner.
Footnotes
- https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/ALP/Welcome/appeal.html
- http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
- https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html
References
Samson, N. (2015). A behind-the-scenes look at the mass resignations at Lingua. University Affairs. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-mass-resignations-at-lingua/
Waltman, L., Larivière, V., Milojević, S., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2020). Opening science: The rebirth of a scholarly journal. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_e_00025