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posted by chromas on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the $ dept.

Editorial Mutiny at Elsevier Journal

The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.

Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.

The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.

Elsevier said in a statement that it regretted the board's decision and that it had tried to address their concerns.

"Since hearing of their concerns, we have explained our position and made a number of concrete proposals to attempt to bridge our differences," Tom Reller, vice president of global communications at Elsevier, said in a statement. "Ultimately they decided to step down and we respect that decision and wish them the best in their future endeavors."

Elsevier's response to the board's requests can be accessed in full here.

This is not the first time the editorial board of an Elsevier-owned journal has quit to start a competing journal. In 2015, the editorial board of top linguistics journal Lingua made headlines by leaving their posts and announcing plans to start a rival open-access publication called Glossa.

Like Lingua, the Journal of Informetrics is considered one of the top journals in its field. It was started in 2007 and focuses on research of measures used to assess the impact of academic research, including bibliometrics, scientometrics, webometrics and altmetrics.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:18AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:18AM (#787791)

    The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.

    Did they just realize this or what? How did they become editors of the journal without realizing what was going on?

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:33AM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:33AM (#787792) Homepage Journal

    If I was Tom I'd make sure none of them ever work in Publishing again. It's called the Black List, folks. And it works very well!!!

    • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:39PM

      by vux984 (5045) on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:39PM (#787927)

      "If I was Tom I'd make sure none of them ever work in Publishing again. It's called the Black List, folks. And it works very well!!"

      It's hard to stop them from getting hired in the industry when they up and form their own business.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @11:31AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @11:31AM (#787850)

    I dislike the tone of the comments so far, as they sound a bit troll-ish (assumption of sour grapes/other shortcoming on the board's part). A little research shows that there's been some ongoing concerns. Example: the Article Publication Charge (APC), which is what the publisher charges the content creator if they want to make their content available elsewhere. From all appearances, the amount charged was increased sharply in mid-2018. This could be part of the board's concerns. (I can't validate this because I wasn't there. However, it's possible.)

    Given that both the board and the publisher have made neutral statements, it's best to not make derogatory statements about either party. Otherwise, Soylent becomes part of the rage-machine.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:27PM (#787920)

      these people's field of work is to measure and grade other scientists based on the number of clicks their article gets (it's right there in the summary: "webometrics").
      I say both the board and the publisher can go to hell, I have actual work to do.
      who the hell funds their "research", anyway?

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 17 2019, @03:18PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 17 2019, @03:18PM (#787896) Journal

    Did they just realize this or what? How did they become editors of the journal without realizing what was going on?

    $There $hurely mu$t have$ been $ome rea$$on why thi$ principle wa$ initially overlooked$$$.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.