"What a Mass Exodus at a Linguistics Journal Means for Scholarly Publishing" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.2015)
"What a Mass Exodus at a Linguistics Journal Means for Scholarly Publishing"
By Ellen Wexler
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5th Novembre 2015
It was the kind of exit designed to make a statement.
Last week all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The announcement re-energized concerns about the relationship between academics and for-profit companies, and the future of scholarly publishing.
Lingua’s editors were worried that some libraries could no longer afford the price of the publication. In a "renegotiation" letter they sent to Elsevier in early October, citing a "changing academic-publishing paradigm," they laid out a number of conditions. At the top of the list: Lingua would become a fully open-access publication, and Elsevier would grant the editors ownership of the journal.
But Elsevier rejected those proposals, and it plans to continue publishing Lingua under a new team.
Lingua is a hybrid open-access journal. Authors have the option of paying an $1,800 publication fee to make their articles open access, or free of charge to readers. The journal’s editors wanted to make all articles open access, to lower the publication fee to around $430, and to let authors retain copyright on their articles.
Elsevier responded in a statement on Wednesday. "Had we made the journal open access only and at the suggested price point, it would have rendered the journal no longer viable," said the statement, signed by Tom Reller, the company’s head of global corporate relations.
As for the suggestion that Elsevier hand over Lingua to its editors and allow them to shift the journal to a new publisher after six months’ notice, Mr. Reller wrote: "Elsevier cannot agree to this as we have invested considerable amount of time, money, and other resources into making it a respected journal in its field. We founded Lingua 66 years ago."
But Johan Rooryck, Lingua’s executive editor, said that the journal was originally published by a company called North Holland, and that Elsevier purchased the journal in the 1990s.
The editors, who agreed to stay at Lingua through December, plan to start their own journal, a move they see as part of a wider shift toward open-access publishing.
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