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'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees
More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the "greed" of publishing giant Elsevier.
The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King's College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.
Academics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing, which outstrip those made by Apple, Google and Amazon.
Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now "open access" rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is "unethical" and bears no relation to the costs involved.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 10, @12:29PM (1 child)
Really, what the journals are selling to academics is "My work has been published in $PRESTIGIOUS_JOURNAL, you should give me tenure".
(And of course the tenure committee will probably respond to that with "no", regardless of the quality or lack thereof of the academic's work, but because there's an ongoing effort by mostly-non-teaching administrators to eliminate tenure as a concept in academia, replacing professors making good professional incomes with desperate adjuncts making $16K a year if they're lucky.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 10, @12:39PM
Sure, but for example PRL is probably the most prestigious physics journal and is run by scientists as a not-for-profit. Nature Physics (for profit) is higher impact factor but not necessarily higher impact, and above that are the cross-field journals like Science (AAAS, not-for-profit) and Nature (for profit).
So GP says "why don't scientists organise themselves", to which the answer is "they have" (at least in my field).