BeerBrarian: Parsing Elsevier: Lingua and Open Access | 2015

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-07-27

Summary:

"In late October, the editors and editorial board, six and thirty-one people, respectively, of the linguistics journal Lingua resigned. They did so to protest the publisher's, Elsevier, policies and pricing, having unsuccessfully asked the company to convert the journal to open access and hearing from libraries that one of linguistics premier journals was becoming too expensive. Per Inside Higher Ed:

'Johan Rooryck, executive editor of the journal until his resignation takes effect at the end of the year, said in an interview that when he started his editorship in 1998, "I could have told you to the cent what the journal cost," and that it was much more affordable. Now, he said, single subscriptions are so expensive that it is "unsustainable" for many libraries to subscribe. Rooryck is professor of French linguistics at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, where academic and government leaders have been sharply critical of journal prices.'

This was not the first instance of a journal editorial board quitting over Elsevier, as The Economist noted in 2012:

'In 2006, for example, the entire editorial board of Topology, a mathematics journal published by Elsevier, resigned, citing similar worries about high prices choking off access. And the board of K-theory, a maths journal owned by Springer, a German publishing firm, quit in 2007.'

Simmons hosts a comprehensive list of journals that have declared independence.

Tom Reller, Vice President and Head of Global Corporate Relations at Elsevier, addressed this most recent resignation in a blog post. In it, Reller makes a number of claims that should go fact-checked. I do so below.

I am not the first person to parse Elsevier's statement. Martin Eve, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London and head of the Open Library of Humanities, which will play host to the new journal to be run by the previous editors of Lingua, Glossa, does an excellent job clarifying some of what Reller wrote. Eve notes that it was not Rooryck, solo, who wanted to take ownership of the journal, as Reller asserts, but rather the editors, writ large, and counters Reller's claim that Elsevier founded the journal. More importantly, Eve takes issue with Reller's definition of "sustainable," given that Elsevier reported a 37% operating profit in 2014...."

Link:

https://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2015/11/parsing-elsevier-lingua-and-open-access.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.declarations_of_independence oa.gold oa.milestones oa.elsevier oa.resignations oa.prices oa.glossa oa.linguistics oa.history_of oad.notice oa.profits oa.publishers oa.fees oa.sustainability oa.journals oa.economics_of oa.ssh

Date tagged:

07/27/2018, 06:15

Date published:

07/27/2018, 02:16