Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

At the end of June 2017, the four editors-in-chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics informed Springer that they will not renew their contracts, which terminate on 31 December 2017. Nearly all of the editorial board members will also resign, to form the editorial board of a new journal that will be called Algebraic Combinatorics, run according to Fair Open Access Principles.

The part that I like most here is the sense that it’s part of an inevitable and historic shift away from legacy publishers and their subscription paywalls. Here’s what Hugh Thomas, one of JACo’s four Editors-in-Chief, said when asked “why now?”:

There wasn’t a particular crisis. It has been becoming more and more clear that commercial journal publishers are charging high subscription fees and high Article Processing Charges (APCs), profiting from the volunteer labour of the academic community, and adding little value. It is getting easier and easier to automate the things that they once took care of.

This seems exactly right to me. In the past, subscription journals’ flips to open access have mostly been precipitated by some specific event — often, a hefty price rise. But I think we’re now at the point where the inherent advantages of open access are so obvious to editors, and the contribution provided by traditional publishers are so small relative to the costs they impose, that simply walking away is an increasingly attractive option.

It’s not that Springer did something wrong. It’s just that what they’re doing that’s right isn’t enough to justify the damage that their paywalls and other control mechanisms do.

BTW., the flip was advised and facilitated by MathOA, a new organisation that aims to do for mathematics what LingOA has been doing for linguistics. May they both have many more successes!