Vincent Tunru: Escaping Elsevier – Flockademic – Medium

"At the end of 1999, the then editor-in-chief of Elsevier’s Journal of Logic Programming Maurice Bruynooghe resigned from his position after several years of being unable to convince Elsevier to improve the journal’s pricing strategy. The 50 members of the editorial board followed his lead, and then founded the alternative journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming that went on to replace Elsevier’s journal as the official journal of the Association of Logic Programming. ...

These journals have managed to successfully break free from Elsevier’s shackles. What‘s the secret to their success? How did they manage to transfer their author and reader base to the new journals?

The key factor, in my view, is that these were bottom-up initiatives by academics themselves. All these transitions were led by academics who were influential in their respective communities. This meant that they were able to effectively spread the word of the new journals to the relevant researchers. And more importantly: it meant that they were able to break an important link in the vicious cycle of scholarly publishing: the stranglehold of the Impact Factor...."