
Math Journal Editors Quit for Open Access - colinprince
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/31/math-journal-editors-resign-start-rival-open-access-journal
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baldfat
As a former System's Librarian YES! This is such a racket. You sell new
Journals to libraries and you made your living just doing that. Some of the
Journals are hundreds of dollars to have in print. Libraries then put the old
journals in behind the new one for about 18 or so copies. The older ones get
stored in boxes and collect dust. Occasionally (10 out of a thousand students
will come in and ask for help to find a journal. That was all.

As Journals came online they solved the storage and accessibility problems for
the library. $30,000 a year to save your library team all the work and
increase accessibility is AWESOME sales pitch. Within 3 years our $30,000 bill
became $90,000 and today my old library has 3 less librarians due to the cost
of digital access (Or so I am told). Digital Access = free money that they
never got till now. Also many Journals are not included in the digital access
for 12 to 18 months so that their print business stayed at the same level and
so did the storage for libraries.

To think of all that and the fact that most of the Journals's research has
direct use of tax payer funds but not give tax payer access is crazy. Also
knowledge is power and all our top knowledge is behind closed doors. Drove me
nuts.

------
n4r9
Readers might also be interested to hear that Timothy Gowers, Cambridge
mathematics professor and one of the foremost voices of the Elsevier boycott,
has pioneered the creation of a peer-reviewed mathematics journal which acts
as an Arxiv overlay and is free to publish in.

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-
an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-
overlay-journal/)

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merraksh
I hope this is just the beginning. What would make this easier is a free
platform for article submission and refereeing. That usually takes away 90% of
the menial work of inviting referees, storing reviews, managing revisions,
etc. Some non-free options such as Editorial Manager and Elsevier's own system
are slow and awkward.

~~~
baldfat
This has been going on for decades but it doesn't seem to touch JSTOR and
company much at all in the long run. AKA Read that in this article.

They are thinking that this might be different but I guarantee you there are
plenty of other University Professors that would love to have the title of
Chief Editor to make them look good to their school's administration and ease
their research load.

~~~
merraksh
Well, even with infinitely many greedy would-be EiC of a paid-access journal
it just takes one open-access journal in the same area with some well-known
editor to change things.

The problem is not that at least one such paid-access journal exists, it is
that it takes time for any journal to earn reputation. Once that happens, you
probably get a lower teaching/research load as an EiC of an open-access
journal as well.

~~~
baldfat
Work flow is also the issue. As a researcher many just pop into their one
database MAYBE two and see what's in their walled garden.

I would work on getting people to use Open Journal search engines but then
they were disappointed in the inconsistent quality of journals.

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code4tee
Good for them. The academic publishing industry needs a good shakeup.

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Sharlin
Evidently their contracts didn't have a proper no-compete clause. </s>

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
No-compete clauses rarely hold up in court anyway.

~~~
fnord123
Most of the governance board is in Europe:

[http://www.mathoa.org/sample-page/governance-
structure/](http://www.mathoa.org/sample-page/governance-structure/)

Depending on the country, the non compete will be invalid. e.g. UK where this
would be listed as 'restraint of trade' if the previous publisher was not
still paying the editors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
compete_clause#Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
compete_clause#Europe)

Also, they're only valid within the same country so if the editors happened to
move country then the non-compete would have been invalidated.

------
MichaelBurge
E-JC is also notable for combinatorics:
[http://www.combinatorics.org/](http://www.combinatorics.org/)

