"The entire editorial board of a US academic journal has resigned in protest over restrictions that would require scholars to wait up to 18 months before making their published research more widely available on open access, or pay a fee of nearly $3000.
The stoush marks the latest chapter in the open access debate, which centres on the rights of academics who have their work published in commercial journals to also share their research findings in open access repositories or to publish instead in free journals with no pay wall ...
In the latest development, the editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration, published by Taylor and Francis, quit over licensing terms that editor Damon Jaggars described as 'too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors.' 'Authors find the author agreement unclear and too restrictive and have repeatedly requested some form of Creative Commons license in its place,' Jaggars was quoted as saying ... Publisher Taylor and Francis stipulated that academics may put a copy of their edited journal article into an institutional repository but only 12 months after publication for science, engineering, behavioural science, and medicine. For arts, social science, and humanities journals, the waiting period is 18 months. 'After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor and Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $US2995 per article fee to be paid by the author,' Jaggars said. 'Thus, the Board came to the conclusion that it is not possible to produce a quality journal under the current licensing terms offered by Taylor and Francis and chose to collectively resign.' Dr Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer for the Australian Open Access Support Group, said the Journal of Library Administration board’s resignation was the latest in a series of resignation by editors and editorial boards in protest over licensing restrictions. 'A webpage put together by the Open Access Directory called Journal declarations of independence lists examples of ‘the resignation of editors from a journal in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher’. There are 20 journals listed on the pages, with the timeline running from 1989 to 2008,' Dr Kingsley wrote on her blog ... Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Technology, Information and Learning Support at the Queensland University of Technology and a Creative Commons expert said it was not the first time but it was unusual for a journal editorial board to quit over open access.'Significantly, it’s in response to a charging problem which will be around for a while as business models are worked out,' he said. 'The idea of having to pay an article processing charge of $3000 in a journal which is also charging a subscription fee is repugnant. It’s double dipping.' UNSW art academic Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn, who also edits an open access data base of Australian art and design called Design and Art of Australia Online, said it was 'about time universities reconsidered their relationship to scholarly academic journals, and in particular the the way they have enabled a small group of publishers to make academics hostage to their commercial interests ...' Colin Steele, Emeritus Fellow at the Australian National University and an expert in open book publishing welcomed the stand taken by the Journal of Library Administration editorial board. 'It’s a very good stand because, by and large, academics are ‘protected’ from paying for journals directly — their University libraries do — will now start questioning the economics of scholarly communication,' he said but added that the high Australian dollar had cushioned the debate on library subscriptions ... 'There is an obligation, particularly here for the Australian library and information journals, given the place of libraries both historically and currently in disseminating knowle