Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 17 2019, @09:04AM

    by driverless (4770) on Thursday January 17 2019, @09:04AM (#787826)

    No, it's concrete as in concrete overcoat. This is Elsevier we're talking about here, not Lulu's Vegan Cafe and Bookshop.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2