“The editor of a journal whose editorial board staged a mass walkout has said that he hopes that the decision encourages others to do the same.
After more than a year of crisis talks, the full editorial board of The Journal of Informetrics, a quarterly, peer-reviewed title published by Elsevier, resigned on 12 January, citing immovable differences over the publisher’s lack of progress towards open access….”
“Today, the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) announces the launch of the new journal Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), published by MIT Press. The editorial board of QSS consists of the members of the former editorial board of Journal of Informetrics (JOI), an Elsevier journal. The members of the editorial board of JOI, which include CWTS researchers Nees Jan van Eck, Anthony van Raan, and Paul Wouters, have unanimously resigned and have moved to QSS. An important reason for the resignation is Elsevier’s lack of support for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Disagreements about journal ownership and open access policies have played a role as well….”
“After several months of earnest attempts on our part, Elsevier was told on January 10 that the Editorial Board of our Journal of Informetrics (JOI) had decided to resign. Subsequently the board announced they will start a new journal: Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). QSS is being launched with financial support from the MIT Libraries and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). More information on the board’s decision can be found in an announcement from the current Editor-in-Chief here. We wish the board well with their new venture.
Elsevier launched JOI in 2007 in collaboration with this scientific community, and it has since been consistently valued. After many years of strong collaboration, last year the board raised concerns with some of the journal’s policies. We responded to each of these concerns, explaining our position and making concrete proposals to attempt to bridge our differences and move forward together. These were outlined in a Letter to the Board in October 2018, the key points of which are included below….”
In the remainder of its statement, Elsevier responds to three points made by the resigning editors: (1) open citations, (2) open access, and (3) ownership.
“The editorial board of an influential scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — has resigned in protest over the open-access policies of its publisher, Elsevier, and launched a competing publication.
The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community….”
“As more and more editorial boards come into conflict over the open science policies of their journal, one decides to resign and take their expertise elsewhere. Today the entire editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics, a major publication in the field of Scientometrics and Informetrics, has unanimously resigned their position. In the future they will dedicate their time to a new full open access journal: Quantitative Science Studies. Robert-Jan Smits: “I hope that this example will inspire many more to follow suit.“
The move has been in the making for over a year tells Johan Rooryck (Leiden University), an expert in the field of flipping journals. He was involved in the transition on behalf of the Fair Open Access Alliance and explains the origin of the move. “It basically comes down to a conflict between the editorial board and Elsevier over the openness of the journal. In this case the availability of citation data was a major issue.”
In their response to a shifting landscape major publishing houses are preparing for a future where citation data and other metrics are expected to become much more important aspect of their business. It is therefore not unexpected that publishers want to retain ownership over this type of valuable data. Last year the European Commission was openly criticised for the involvement of Elsevier in the Open Science Monitor leading to a formal complaint to the European Ombudsman….”
“The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resignedThursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.
Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.
The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.
Elsevier said in a statement that it regretted the board’s decision and that it had tried to address their concerns.
“Since hearing of their concerns, we have explained our position and made a number of concrete proposals to attempt to bridge our differences,” Tom Reller, vice president of global communications at Elsevier, said in a statement. “Ultimately they decided to step down and we respect that decision and wish them the best in their future endeavors.”
Elsevier’s response to the board’s requests can be accessed in full here.
This is not the first time the editorial board of an Elsevier-owned journal has quit to start a competing journal. In 2015, the editorial board of top linguistics journal Lingua made headlines by leaving their postsand announcing plans to start a rival open-access publication called Glossa….”
The new year begins with good news: The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and its partners announce the founding of a new scientometric open access journal. The journal will be managed by the former board members of the renowned Journal of Informetrics, who have collectively resigned from this Elsevier journal and who would rather continue their work in an open access context after a journal flipping. TIB supports this process by taking on a significant share of the transformation costs….
Under the name Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), the journal complies with the Fair Open Access Principles: transparent academic control, no copyright transfer, use of an open access license for all articles, no APC payment obligation for authors, transparent and low publishing costs. The journal will be owned by the Society and published by MIT Press.
In a joint press release of the new partners, the resigning editors state three main criteria they wanted to have implemented for their journal:
Elsevier did not want to allow these conditions, which lead to the resignation of all editors.
The conditions are comprehensible: The academic ownership increases the chance that profit interests do not dominate the management of the magazine. The Fair Open Access principles are intended to help curb harmful open access models. In particular, the expensive APC (Article Processing Charges) model means that publishing in open access journals is not open to all. In addition, institutions and authors with a high publication output are being punished. The question of open citation data is particularly sensitive in a field of research in which the relations between publications can be very important. In the future, the publisher will automatically make this information available (see also Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)) so that it will become part of the huge corpus of free citation data….”
“Over the last few years, the editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI) has grown increasingly dissatisfied with Elsevier’s actions and policies. While some of those have specific effects on our field—such as Elsevier’s refusal to participate in the Initiative for Open Citation (I4OC)—others are affecting all fields of science—such as its restrictive open access policies and prohibitive subscription costs. The editorial board of JOI expressed these concerns to Elsevier on numerous occasions, with no success. Given the inability of Elsevier to address these issues, the editorial board unanimous resigned on January 10th 2019. As of January 12th 2019, names of associate editors and editorial board members have been removed from the website of the Journal of Informetrics.
The resignation letter can be found here.
Journals should serve the research community—not the other way around. They provide an exchange forum which can only prosper through the work of authors, reviewers, and editors. Therefore, the former editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics unanimously decided to redirect its labor to a newly created journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), published by MIT Press and owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. I invite all of you to join us in this new endeavor and help us demonstrate how the research community can take control back of its means for disseminating knowledge, in a fair, open, and transparent way. We must all work together in making QSS a success, not only for the field of scientometrics and informetrics, but for science as a whole….”
“Based on the letter from Ms. Mesquita on October 9, 2018, we would like to inform you that there are insufficient grounds for us to continue our collaboration with Elsevier as members of the Editorial Board of Journal of Informetrics (JOI). We therefore offer our resignation as JOI editorial board members, effective immediately.
We are disappointed that ownership of JOI and the amount of Article Publishing Charges (APCs) of JOI are non-negotiable for Elsevier. Moreover, we deeply regret that Elsevier is not willing to participate in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). This initiative has broad support in the field of scientometrics (http://issi-society.org/open-citations-letter/) and Elsevier is the only publisher in our field that has not joined the initiative. Because our position on ownership, open access, and open citations is fundamentally irreconcilable with the position of Elsevier, we consider it is no longer in the interest of our community to continue working together with Elsevier as members of the JOI editorial board.
We will honor those obligations we have assumed for manuscripts currently under consideration. We will not, however, assume any additional responsibilities for new submissions received….”
“January 14, 2019. The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) is pleased to announce the launch of a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). QSS is owned by ISSI, the primary scholarly and professional society for scientometrics and informetrics, and will be published jointly with the MIT Press in compliance with fair open access principles. QSS will be a journal run for and by the scientometric community. The initial editorial board will be fully constituted by the former editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI), an Elsevier-owned journal.
The transition of the editorial board from JOI to QSS was initiated by the unanimous resignation, on January 10, of all members of the JOI editorial board. The editorial board members are in agreement that (1) scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, (2) journals should be open access under fair principles, and (3) publishers should make their citation data freely available. These conditions were not accepted by Elsevier, prompting the termination of the relationship with this publisher.
The content for QSS will be open access and therefore freely available for readers worldwide. Funding for establishing and marketing the new journal has been provided in part by the MIT Libraries. To enable access for authors, the MIT Press will charge a comparatively low charge per article which will be fully covered by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for the first three years of operation with support of the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) of the University of Konstanz. The funds from TIB will be managed by the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) to ensure that the journal is operating under fair open access principles. The MIT Press is also a full participant in the I4OC initiative, which promotes unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data….”