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 reports that they ‘regret this decision’….I bet they do. Long live the revolution!