3 ms·

Entire editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigns

191 points by adrianhoward 11y ago

calpaterson 11y ago
Another interesting case where this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning_(journal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning_(journal)
- burkaman 11y ago
  Seems to have been somewhat successful; JMLR is listed higher than ML in most rankings I can find.
phireal 11y ago
I don't like that the journals with the highest impact factors in my field are all owned by Elsevier, Wiley etc. It'd be nice if this sort of action could occur across the whole of academia with a move toward open access journals. Hopefully this is the start of that movement.
jordigh 11y ago
So, "entire staff" seems to mean 2 people or perhaps 5: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/lingua/editorial-board/ http://www.journals.elsevier.com/lingua/editorial-board/ I hope that these two or five people have enough pull behind them to convince other editors to do the same.
- scott_s 11y ago
  "All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online." From https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-editorial-board-quit-top-linguistics-journal-protest-subscription-fees https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-e..., which is linked in the submission when they mention that all of the academics on the journal resigned.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  In my experience, the editorial staff has a disproportionate impact on the quality of a journal. And having them all leave does two things, one jump starts a new journal with a lot of credibility with the field, and two really inhibits people in the field from wanting to work on the "former" journal because these people made such a public stand against its immorality.
baldfat 11y ago
Great News!!! Former Academic Systems Librarian for a college of around 1,000 students. We paid $50,000 annually to access our journals 10 years ago. They weren't even the new Journals but ones that were a few months to a year old. What a money racket it was. I was also in Grad School (Historical Theology) at the time and I personally boycotted any articles that were not Open Sourced and Free Access. It was hard and I had to talk with my Professors before I did that and well sometimes I just couldn't find research and break my rule BUT I think I was at around 95% of the time faithful to my pledge. It was IMPOSSIBLE for my MLS (Masters in Library Science) those suckers were locked tight back than. Librarians almost always equal the keepers of copyright and withholding resources (I don't get it still except for job security or fear).
- dogma1138 11y ago
  That's actually on the cheaper side, journals especially upto date ones are pretty non-existent in the public library space anymore, I remember when I was in highschool you could actually go the the Uni library and get access to material regardless of you being a student there or not but they've also restricted access to academic journals and data-bases to students only. And if you aren't an academic well that access is pretty much out of your reach at all, some won't even allow you to pay if you don't belong to an academic institution or just scam you for even more access (seen 800$ access fees vs 175$ for an edu account), so unless you work for an employer runs it's own library you are completely screwed which is just beyond stupid. Journals don't fund research, most of them don't even take care of the peer review process any more, the writers of the paper aren't getting paid squat, and they just milk you more and more each year. If they want to continue to sell hard copies they can go a head, but the cost of publishing online today is zero, and before some yells bandwidth this and bandwidth that I'm pretty sure that Google and Wikimedia Foundation would gladly take care of the costs. Considering how much higher education costs, universities and colleges should also be mandated to open their libraries to the public for free, sure some services like study rooms can be either restricted to students only or have a charge for non-students but I really don't understand why basic thing as library and even non-lab lecture access shouldn't be available to the public. I've used to sneak to interesting lectures quite a bit before every school started mandating 78 forms of ID and a retina scan to use the water fountain...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Would be wonderful if they started a trend.
protomyth 11y ago
"The open access model allows anyone, whether an academic or not, to read a journal online for free. Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers." I'm a little confused on how this impacts the pool of articles that can be drawn from.
hackuser 11y ago
One drawback of these high prices is that it keeps the best knowledge on most subjects from disseminating to the public, a significant blow to the often poorly-informed public and a waste of knowledge (which generally has little value unless shared). For example, even in a relatively sophisticated forum like HN where there is a respect and hunger for knowledge, how often does someone link to an actual journal article? Who has even an opportunity to read them? There are occasional links to Nature, Science, or IEEE or ACM publications, but the best knowledge is bottled up beyond our reach. At best we get to read blogs and newspapers talking about the research.
hackuser 11y ago
The open access movement seems connected, in many minds, to the rise of the Internet. But these academic associations could have done the same long ago; a few college students can get together and produce and print magazines by the thousands on a shoestring, so certainly these associations could have printed their own journals. I don't understand how they ended up paying these high prices in the first place. Does anyone know the history of it?
- shas3 11y ago
  Typesetting of research papers was way more complex (for authors) in the pre-personal computer days (pre 1990, say). So you needed publishers to pay and employ people to do this. And then you also have the logistics of mailing the journals to thousands of libraries across the world. The time and effort involved in this certainly justifies at least some of the conventional costs, given that the cost scales almost linearly with the number of subscribers, number of pages, etc. The big 'step-change' with the internet is that this linear scaling doesn't exist any more, we are reduced to a fixed cost and it is price-gouging for publishers to charge per page, per article, etc. etc. Ninja edit: In the internet era, here is one post that describes how much it costs to run a journal, the prestigious Journal of Machine Learning Research http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficien...
e12e 11y ago
I don't know. On the one hand, I hope we will see more open access, on the other hand: > Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers. So, the institution behind the researchers are paying for the review of their own research? That doesn't sound like the best way to line up incentives? That might not matter much, as recent news stories imply that the whole racket isn't really working all that well anyway - but I'm not sure that particular model is the best way to go?

191 points by adrianhoward 11y ago

Another interesting case where this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning_(journal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning_(journal)

burkaman 11y ago
Seems to have been somewhat successful; JMLR is listed higher than ML in most rankings I can find.

phireal 11y ago

I don't like that the journals with the highest impact factors in my field are all owned by Elsevier, Wiley etc. It'd be nice if this sort of action could occur across the whole of academia with a move toward open access journals. Hopefully this is the start of that movement.

jordigh 11y ago

So, "entire staff" seems to mean 2 people or perhaps 5: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/lingua/editorial-board/ http://www.journals.elsevier.com/lingua/editorial-board/ I hope that these two or five people have enough pull behind them to convince other editors to do the same.

scott_s 11y ago
"All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online." From https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-editorial-board-quit-top-linguistics-journal-protest-subscription-fees https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-e..., which is linked in the submission when they mention that all of the academics on the journal resigned.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
In my experience, the editorial staff has a disproportionate impact on the quality of a journal. And having them all leave does two things, one jump starts a new journal with a lot of credibility with the field, and two really inhibits people in the field from wanting to work on the "former" journal because these people made such a public stand against its immorality.

baldfat 11y ago

Great News!!! Former Academic Systems Librarian for a college of around 1,000 students. We paid $50,000 annually to access our journals 10 years ago. They weren't even the new Journals but ones that were a few months to a year old. What a money racket it was. I was also in Grad School (Historical Theology) at the time and I personally boycotted any articles that were not Open Sourced and Free Access. It was hard and I had to talk with my Professors before I did that and well sometimes I just couldn't find research and break my rule BUT I think I was at around 95% of the time faithful to my pledge. It was IMPOSSIBLE for my MLS (Masters in Library Science) those suckers were locked tight back than. Librarians almost always equal the keepers of copyright and withholding resources (I don't get it still except for job security or fear).

dogma1138 11y ago
That's actually on the cheaper side, journals especially upto date ones are pretty non-existent in the public library space anymore, I remember when I was in highschool you could actually go the the Uni library and get access to material regardless of you being a student there or not but they've also restricted access to academic journals and data-bases to students only. And if you aren't an academic well that access is pretty much out of your reach at all, some won't even allow you to pay if you don't belong to an academic institution or just scam you for even more access (seen 800$ access fees vs 175$ for an edu account), so unless you work for an employer runs it's own library you are completely screwed which is just beyond stupid. Journals don't fund research, most of them don't even take care of the peer review process any more, the writers of the paper aren't getting paid squat, and they just milk you more and more each year. If they want to continue to sell hard copies they can go a head, but the cost of publishing online today is zero, and before some yells bandwidth this and bandwidth that I'm pretty sure that Google and Wikimedia Foundation would gladly take care of the costs. Considering how much higher education costs, universities and colleges should also be mandated to open their libraries to the public for free, sure some services like study rooms can be either restricted to students only or have a charge for non-students but I really don't understand why basic thing as library and even non-lab lecture access shouldn't be available to the public. I've used to sneak to interesting lectures quite a bit before every school started mandating 78 forms of ID and a retina scan to use the water fountain...

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Would be wonderful if they started a trend.

protomyth 11y ago

"The open access model allows anyone, whether an academic or not, to read a journal online for free. Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers." I'm a little confused on how this impacts the pool of articles that can be drawn from.

hackuser 11y ago

One drawback of these high prices is that it keeps the best knowledge on most subjects from disseminating to the public, a significant blow to the often poorly-informed public and a waste of knowledge (which generally has little value unless shared). For example, even in a relatively sophisticated forum like HN where there is a respect and hunger for knowledge, how often does someone link to an actual journal article? Who has even an opportunity to read them? There are occasional links to Nature, Science, or IEEE or ACM publications, but the best knowledge is bottled up beyond our reach. At best we get to read blogs and newspapers talking about the research.

hackuser 11y ago

The open access movement seems connected, in many minds, to the rise of the Internet. But these academic associations could have done the same long ago; a few college students can get together and produce and print magazines by the thousands on a shoestring, so certainly these associations could have printed their own journals. I don't understand how they ended up paying these high prices in the first place. Does anyone know the history of it?

shas3 11y ago
Typesetting of research papers was way more complex (for authors) in the pre-personal computer days (pre 1990, say). So you needed publishers to pay and employ people to do this. And then you also have the logistics of mailing the journals to thousands of libraries across the world. The time and effort involved in this certainly justifies at least some of the conventional costs, given that the cost scales almost linearly with the number of subscribers, number of pages, etc. The big 'step-change' with the internet is that this linear scaling doesn't exist any more, we are reduced to a fixed cost and it is price-gouging for publishers to charge per page, per article, etc. etc. Ninja edit: In the internet era, here is one post that describes how much it costs to run a journal, the prestigious Journal of Machine Learning Research http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficien...

e12e 11y ago

I don't know. On the one hand, I hope we will see more open access, on the other hand: > Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers. So, the institution behind the researchers are paying for the review of their own research? That doesn't sound like the best way to line up incentives? That might not matter much, as recent news stories imply that the whole racket isn't really working all that well anyway - but I'm not sure that particular model is the best way to go?