Blog

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

1. https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/ALP/Welcome/appeal.html
2. http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
3. 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

Toluwase Asubiaro, September 12, 2020

Welcome to our “unbundling big deals” website. You may rightly be wondering; what are the “big deals”? Big deals are the bundle of subscription packages that are paid for by universities so that members of their academic communities can have access to the subscribed resources. The commonest big deals are made with journal publishers so that professors and students can have access to their journals which are mostly closed access. Think of Elsevier, Springer, Emerald, Sage, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis publishing well more than 50% of all the journal articles in 2013 (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon, 2015), bundling subscription to access to all the journals is any of these publishers’ database is a “big deal”.

Now that the I have explained the concept of “big deal”, it will be easy to as well explain the meaning of “unbundling the big deal”. Studies such as Shu et al., (2018) have shown that library patrons derive little value from the big deals, sometimes over 75% of journals in “big deal” packages are either uncited or totally unused by the university scholars. Because of this, methods have been devised to identify the journals that academic community in a university use. Some of these methods employ usage data form the internet, citation data from bibliographic databases and survey data from professors and graduate students. University libraries therefore opt to subscribe to the few journals that are used or useful in their patrons.

Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi-org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Shu, F., Mongeon, P., Haustein, S., Siler, K., Alperin, J. P., & Larivière, V. (2018). Is It Such a Big Deal? On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era | Shu | College & Research Libraries. College and Research Libraries, 79(6), 785–798. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.6.785

Journal of Infometrics (JOI) editors resigned in 2019 to start Quantitative Science Studies because of the unethical and unfair practices of Elsevier, one of the “big five” academic journal publishers.

At the point of creating JOI in 2005, Elsevier was attractive as the ideal publisher for the academic journal because of its reputations as one of biggest global academic publishers and the consequence of the astronomical “big deal” cost was non-existent. By 2019, the quest for profits at the expense of ethical, fair and sustainable publishing practices drove the 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.

This is one the types of responses from the academia against the unfair profit-driven attitude of the big publishers. Libraries are responding by cancelling their “big deals”, and finding means of accessing publishers resources in an affordable manner.

References

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

The unsustainable constantly rising cost of “big deals” is one of the big concerns that university libraries face in recent years. Academic libraries therefore have devised strategies and employed different tools, including analytical tools such as the Journal Usage Project (JUP) and Journal Value Analytics (JVA), to understand the value that the academic communities they serve derive from the costly subscription to journal packages.

The “unbundling” analytical tools help academic libraries to take data-driven decisions to cut cost so that they can confidently subscribe to less expensive smaller packages of journals over the costly “big deals”. Unsub, launched in 2019, is one of the new analytics software that is being used by universities for “unbundling” big deals. It is a fast rising scholarly data analytics tool, as it has more than 200 already.

One of the proofs of the workings of analytic tools like Unsub is the whooping sum that was saved in subscription cost to Elsevier journals by the State University of New York (SUNY) library system. According to the Sciencemag, SUNY Libraries Consortium (SLC) reduced the cost of its Elsevier “big deal” from 9 million dollars annually by “unbundling” and subscribing to smaller package of 2 million dollars. With data-driven analysis from Unsub, SLC was able to save about 7 million dollars in 2020 and at the same time provide access to academic resources that are needed by its academic community.

The State University of New York (SUNY) has taken steps to “unbundle” its big deal with Elsevier publisher. The negotiations, which spanned about eighteen months, was led by the SUNY Libraries Consortium (SLC) on behalf of the university. SUNY is the biggest comprehensive university in the United States, with over 64 campuses. According to SPARC¹ “big deal” cancellation tracking website, this is one of the six “big deal” journal packages cancellation by United States universities in 2020. Other universities in the United States. Other universities in the United States that have cancelled their “big deal” journal and database subscription with academic publishers are: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, University of Idaho, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Iowa State University, and Illinois Institute of Technology.

Footnotes:

1. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/

According to an announcement which was posted on the Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ Hungarian Consortium ) website on 24th February 2020, the consortium will not renew its 2020 big deal contract with Taylor and Francis.