Editors and editorial board quit top linguistics journal to protest subscription fees | Inside Higher Ed

"All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors' noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa. The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn't even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy. Under 'bundling,' in which academic libraries buy many journals together, the total could be less, but the journal might also not make the cut in the decisions of a library under pressure to buy access to journals in many disciplines. And many libraries complain that bundling doesn't create true savings, as the bundles include many journals they don't want ..."