Splitting the Difference — Does an Editorial Mutiny at a Journal Do Much Long-term Damage? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Last month, the editor and the editorial Board of the Journal of Library Administration (JLA) resigned en masse over the copyright policies of JLA’s publisher Taylor & Francis. The editors claimed that the T&F author agreement is 'too restrictive and out of step with the expectations of authors.' Not surprisingly, T&F disputes the characterization of their copyright transfer policies. There has been a fair bit written about the editors’ and Board members’ reactions. Realistically, will the actions of this Board affect change either for JLA, Taylor & Francis, or, more broadly, the field of library and information studies scholarship? This is not the first time that an editorial group has quit in protest over a publisher’s policies. Over the past 15 years or so, there was something of a movement by editors to quit old established journals in protest and form new journals in the hope that they could transform scholarly communications by supporting new business models or approaches — while simultaneously damaging the brand of titles that were viewed as unfavorable to library or scholarly interests. As movements go, it was modest in size. Peter Suber maintained a list of 14 different instances when journal editors or editorial boards resigned, 12 of whom left to start up new titles. (Fourteen titles are listed, but one did not launch a new title, while another was never launched by the original commercial press.) Suber’s list only covers activity between 1989 and 2004. It appears most of the information was moved to a more up-to-date list of Journal Declarations of Independence that is hosted by Simmons College as part of the Open Access Directory (OAD) wiki. The OAD list includes 22 titles, including the recent announcement of the JLA board. As movements go, the 'independence' movement of journal editors is very modest in size; considering the number of academic journals is more than 25,000 according to the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), it represents only 0.088% of all scholarly journals. To be fair, many more editors, authors, and activists have simply moved quietly to publishing new OA titles and stopped publishing in traditional journals without “declaring their independence.” An important question is whether these declarations have had an impact on the individual title that was being boycotted. Did the decision by the editors have any impact that transformed scholarly communications as they usually claimed they desired or envisioned? One cannot deny the successes of the OA movement over the years, but what impact is this related movement having on the traditional publishing environment? The results of the 'independence movement' appear mixed. Of the 22 titles that experienced an editorial revolt, almost all continue to be published today by their original publisher. In most cases, the boycotted title has continued to thrive. It is difficult to know exactly the impact on the state of the journal after a boycott, since the key metrics of a journal’s success — such as its circulation, its finances, its download figures, and its submission and rejection rates — are usually closely held. One of the more public assessment criteria is a journal’s impact factor. With the kind assistance of Marie McVeigh, Director, JCR and Bibliographic Policy at Thomson Reuters, we’ve compiled impact factors of the titles that were noted on Suber’s list and their associated new journals. Of the 12 titles on Suber’s list that left to start up new titles, 10 have comparable impact factors between the old journal and the new journal. Of those where no comparison is possible, one of the new titles is not ranked by Thomson Reuters and, for the second, neither the original nor subsequent journal was ranked in the impact factor. I’ve compared these available data in Table 1, below. Of the other 10 comparable titles, six have an impact factor greater than that of the title from which the editors split at the time of the split. Four of the new titles have impact factors that are less than the boycotted title’s IF at the time of the split. Compared to the current IFs of boycotted titles, the IFs look a bit better for the new journals; seven of the new titles were better rated than the title that was subject of the revolt. The average impact factor of the new title is more than 50% greater than the boycotted title, with one outlier that is more than five times better off than the boycotted title. The boycotts seem not to have caused long-term damage on those titles, however. Of the 11 titles ranked, nine of the titles have higher impact factors than at the time of the split ..."