“Elsevier preys on the academic community, claiming huge profits while adding little value to science.” Professor Chris Chambers makes his thoughts clear as one of the contingent of one of the over 40 leading scientists who have resigned from the editorial board of NeuroImage in response to Elsevier’s arbitrarily high costs of publication – despite the fact that, as Chambers makes clear, the company adds little value to science.
Unfortunately, while this mass-resignation sends a clear message regarding the feelings of many academics, Elsevier does not stand alone – as publishers are able to keep their profit margins extremely high just based on the current business model. Universities and Institutions sponsor research – at not cost to the publisher, academics generally sit on editorial boards, conduct reviews, and collate the issues and prepare them for publication at zero or minimal cost to the publisher; but for authors and researchers, the cost comes either in the form of consistently increasing Article Processing Charges, or subscription plans that can be unsustainable for individual researchers or labs, and often take up a massive portion of a library’s yearly acquisition budget.
Ultimately, despite some of the developments urging academics and publishers to support independent, open publication practices, reputations of well-known established publishers allow them to raise APCs to prices that would otherwise be completely uncompetitive and inaccessible. This mass-resignation could be the type of action that could leverage big publishers into keeping prices for publication for open access work more reasonable, as the threat of rival journals with the reputations of the new, formerly Elsevier editorial teams could present a threat to their business model.
More recently this summer, the editorial board of Elsevier’s Design Studies also left the journal in mass in response to removal of the editor-in-chief Peter Lloyd, fairly nakedly in response to his resistance to rapidly increasing the amount of articles accepted by the journal each month. One of the editors involved in the walkout, Linden Ball, who is a board member and professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, reported that board members were “‘appalled’ by Elsevier’s decision to remove Lloyd.” He continued to Inside Higher Ed, “‘This focus on the quantity of published articles rather than their quality appears to be purely motivated by a desire for large profits.‘”
In a moment where the future modes of publication and the ethics of those modes are constantly being scrutinized, the editorial boards of journals published by Elsevier and companies like it hold unique power in there ability to shut down production and point authors and editors to methods of publishing that are more equitable and accessible; motivated by the reputations of the editors and authors involved, rather than the profit motive of a large publishing company.