Journal editors are resigning en masse: what do these group exits achieve?

"Earlier this month, the editors at the linguistics journal Syntax publicly announced their resignations in response to changes to the manuscript-handling process imposed by its publisher, Wiley....

The move is latest such event in what seems to be an emerging form of protest: the mass resignation of academic editors....

“The big theme [of mass resignations] is this tension of competing priorities,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “You have publishers — most of them are for profit — that demand and require constant growth because that's what the stock market requires. You have researchers — academics or editors, for the most part, who champion quality and maybe depth and time to review. Those are in opposition.” ...

Groups of editors who resign sometimes go on to found new publications, over which they have more control. The former editors of Critical Public Health are in the process of setting up a new journal called The Journal of Critical Public Health, hosted by the international Critical Public Health Network in Edinburgh, UK. A similar outcome resulted from the mass resignation of editors at Elsevier journal NeuroImage last April, who have since set up another journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT press...."