
Entire editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigns - adrianhoward
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/11/entire-editorial-staff-of-elsevier-journal-lingua-resigns-over-high-price-lack-of-open-access/
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baldfat
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
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...

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phireal
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.

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

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

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hackuser
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
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-
efficien...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-
journal/)

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protomyth
"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.

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hackuser
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.

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e12e
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?

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ChuckMcM
Would be wonderful if they started a trend.

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jordigh
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
"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-e...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-
editorial-board-quit-top-linguistics-journal-protest-subscription-fees), which
is linked in the submission when they mention that all of the academics on the
journal resigned.

