Rebels hold their own in journal price war | 25 January 2007 | Nature | Declan Butler

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-08-09

Summary:

"Last August, the entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology quit in a row over pricing. Now they are setting up a non-profit competitor to be published by the London Mathematical Society. The Journal of Topology, announced last week, will launch next January and will cost US$570 per year, compared with Topology's $1,665.

It's not the first such move. Over the past eight years, around a dozen cheap or open-access journals have been created to compete directly with an expensive commercial journal, many by editorial boards that had quit the original publication in protest. So, do the cheaper journals fare better than their rivals?

As far as scientific credibility is concerned, the answer is often yes — many of the challengers have obtained impact factors (a measure of the citations its papers receive) higher than their competitor. For example, the Journal of Machine Learning Research, set up in 2001 by editors of Springer's Machine Learning, has a 2005 impact factor of 4.027. “That's the highest in artificial intelligence, automation and control, and ninth in all of computer science,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the journal's editor-in-chief. Machine Learning has a 2005 impact factor of just 3.1.

One of the first defections was Evolutionary Ecology Research, set up in 1999 by Michael Rosenzweig, a researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He defected, along with the entire editorial board, from Evolutionary Ecology, then published by Wolters Kluwer. Rosenzweig had established the journal in 1987, but became disillusioned with price increases. The new journal has survived, with the online version getting up to 80,000 page views a month and a 50% increase in its number of pages, says Rosenzweig. He says the journal pioneered the idea of allowing libraries to subscribe only to an electronic version. Although its impact factor of 1.61 lags behind Evolutionary Ecology's 1.77, he dismisses this as unimportant: “Impact factors are toxic for science and the journals that serve it.”..."

Link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/445351a

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.declarations_of_independence oa.gold oa.milestones oa.publishers oa.publishing oa.business_models oa.stem oa.open_science oa.mathemetics oa.resignations oa.scholcomm oa.elsevier oa.prices oa.access oa.societies oa.lms oa.uk oa.quality oa.jif oa.authors oa.history_of oa.impact oa.journals oa.metrics

Date tagged:

08/09/2018, 09:12

Date published:

08/09/2018, 05:14