Editors of the Journal Lingua Protest-Quit in Battle for Open Access | WIRED

"LAST WEEK, THE editors for the linguistics journal Lingua had finally had enough. Elsevier, a major academic publishing house, has put out the highly regarded journal for decades. But on October 27, the journal’s six editors and 31 members of its editorial board quit. Their beef? The high fees Elsevier charges authors and academic institutions to see the journal. The mutiny of Lingua’s editors is another battle in the long-running war over whether academic research should be sold by publishers as part of often costly subscriptions or whether it should be free to all. Lingua’s executive editor Johan Rooryck says that the journal’s editors had asked Elsevier to convert the journal to be fully open access, but when the company declined, they set out to launch their own open access journal, Glossa. It’s supposed to start publishing next year, and the editors’ move may provide a model for other journals to do the same ..."