Open-access advocates see opportunity in Lingua 'editorial mutiny' | Inside Higher Ed

"The editors and editorial board members of the linguistics journal Lingua have stoked antipublisher sentiment with their highly publicized protest against Elsevier. But judging by past revolts, turning their popularity into editorial success for their new journal, Glossa, could be a challenge. Open-access advocates, meanwhile, see the conflict as an opportunity to further their cause. Mass resignations are not a new phenomenon in scholarly publishing. The Open Access Directory, a collaborative website that compiles open-access news, has traced the trend back to 1989. Since the late ’90s, the scholarly publishing world has seen an average of about one such event a year. “This is yet another tempest in a teapot,” Joseph J. Esposito, a digital media, software and publishing consultant, said about the Lingua case. “The upshot is this is not the last one of these we’re going to see.” Perhaps as an indication of how commonplace mass resignations have become, The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog about scholarly publishing and communication to which Esposito contributes, covered the Lingua conflict only indirectly. It pushed back to the front page a 2013 post in which Todd A. Carpenter, executive director of the National Information Standards Organization, tracked the aftermath of 12 other “editorial mutinies.” He concluded mass resignations rarely cause long-term damage to the boycotted journal."

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