Editor's Calculation in Starting New Math Journal Divides His Editorial Board | August 23, 2007 | The Chronicle of Higher Education

"After holding onto accepted manuscripts for more than a year, the managing editor of a mathematics journal has announced he will begin a competitor, according to the new issue of Nature. The editor, Anthony Bak, a mathematician at the University of Bielefeld, in Germany, was fired in January, having not published any issues of the monthly journal K-Theory since April 2006. Mr. Bak told Nature that he had left the journal because its subscription costs were too high and because of production problems at Springer, the journal’s publisher.

The journal’s Board of Editors resigned en masse with Mr. Bak, echoing a move by the editors of another math journal, Topology, who quit to protest its pricing policies and later announced plans to create a cheaper rival. Springer did not learn of the board resignations until May. This month Mr. Bak announced that he would launch the Journal of K-Theory, to be published by Cambridge University Press, at a cheaper subscription rate.

But several of the editors who resigned with Mr. Bak declined to follow him to the new journal because of his withholding of the manuscripts, and two have even returned to the Springer journal. However, they told Nature that the discipline was too small to support two journals, and so they would publish in K-Theory only the papers that had already been accepted. —Lila Guterman

Update: As noted in comment No. 2, below, this report incorrectly stated that two of the editors who resigned from the journal K-Theory had returned. It should have said that one of the two current managing editors of the journal was among those who resigned in January."