What does it mean the mass exodus of academic publications?

Output type was designed to make a statement.
Last week the six editors and editorial board members of 31 Lingua, the resignation of a prominent language magazine, the magazine's publisher, Elsevier after a disagreement. The relationship between academic and non-profit companies, and the announcement on the future of academic publishing concerns re-energized.

[This Higher Education, the leading publication of the American higher education is a Chronicle article. It is presented here thanks to the agreement signed with the University World News.]

Lingua editors were worried that some libraries could no longer afford the price of publication. "Negotiation" Elsevier sent a letter in early October, an "academic-publishing paradigm shift," referring to a number of conditions were set. At the top of the list: Lingua became completely free and publishing, magazine editors and Elsevier ownership would provide.

But Elsevier rejected these proposals, and will continue under a new Lingua publishing group.

Lingua is a hybrid of free and magazines. Authors pay a US $ 1,800 fee for publishing their articles open access, or have the option of free readers. All articles in an open access journal editors, publication fee of around US $ 430 lower, and Authors retain the copyright to their articles.

Elsevier responded in a statement Wednesday. "It was the only free access to the magazine and the proposed price points, we would have to make the magazine is no longer viable," said the statement, Tom Roller, signed by the head of global corporate relations.

We created 66 years ago. "

But Johan Orrick, Lingua's executive editor, said the magazine was originally published by a company called North Holland, and that Elsevier bought the magazine in the 1990s.

The editors, who agreed to stay at Lingua through December, plan their own magazine, a move freely and to publish what they see as part of a broader shift to start.

A 'fundamentally broken' system

On Monday, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities Lingua editors support document. Electronic publications to reduce costs, the organization argued, but subscription rates are going up.

"Publishers have to sell their produce back to the universities as a group, and subscription prices steadily higher," the statement said. "The system is fundamentally broken."

The Association supports low-cost access to information, while in the past, a sign of a new level of support for his formal statement. In the future, its chairman, M Peter McPherson, he said, the organization will continue to discuss the issue.

"This is something we have to think about it for a long time," he said. "This whole question of availability of information at a reasonable cost is important to us."

Lingua's starting staff is not the first publisher to declare independence - or even Elsevier. The open-access advocate Peter sober similar defections, which happen every few years, it seems the list.

Academics subscription journals are concerned about the high cost. Sometimes a challenge because of the sale of the subscription cost for these publishers have sold as package deals or set them to decipher the complicated pricing schemes.

"Publishing is part of the intention to stop this type of disorder," said Jennie P Rogers, director of the library of the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Rogers and is an advocate for free, and he said two years ago in the journal of the American Chemical Society to pricing. Lingua was not surprised by the political conflict, and companies such as Elsevier have to lower their expectations when profit margins are expected to continue to buy their products if the university comes to the libraries, he said.

"More and more libraries are hitting a point of crisis," he said.

Even though the institutions have traditionally been able to afford expensive subscriptions, he added, the library is being forced to make hard decisions in this magazine because the property is concentrated in fewer hands. Early this year, for example, Macmillan Science and Education, the publisher of the journal Nature, Springer Science + Business Media to join.

"As we build on the market like this," Rogers said, "I no longer have a choice."

Land-grant university community is also concerned about the string of mergers in academic publishing. Over the years, McPherson said, smaller companies began to coalesce under the large companies, and publishers now operate without much competition.

"In a day and age we can get seemingly unlimited source of information for the public," the organization said in a statement, "the world of academic publishing more channels will be consolidated into a limited number of well-controlled."

'Journals of change and the editors'

David Clark, a senior vice president of Elsevier, said that if the stories are part of a larger trend that Lingua resignation. Staff sees the start of the year as part of the routine. "Journals and editors shift change," Clark said. "That is usually the case."

Elsevier is not opposed to open access, he added - and the company's free peer-reviewed journals published - some better than others, but the model of discipline that work. Public-access journals are usually based on the fees paid to the authors or their institutions, science tends to work best for the organization, he said, where teachers have access to financing.

"In some countries and in some communities, open access is a very popular, very successful," Clark said. "In other areas, yes, there is a real appetite for affordable or not."

He said he understands the tough choices to deal with libraries, but argued that Elsevier's prices are fair, and these days, "most of the universities have access to the journal."

Publishers such as Elsevier said subscriptions are required to cover the cost of publishing quality. Free and advocates, however, the pricing model is unsustainable. But what they can not agree on just how quickly the shift is being made open access.

"Revolution could be a little more serious," said Peter Benfield, one of the founders of the open-access journal Peer. "Clearly the market for subscription-based academic publishing is moving to open access publishing. But it will not happen overnight."

Lingua editors soon to plan for their new magazine, to be called Gloss, which is free and humanities they envision as a model to start a new journal.

"That's part of the discipline will be with us for a number of other open access journals, so that instead of academic publishing, the outlier linguistics becomes the default We hope that very soon," said Orrick, Lingua's departing executive editor. "That's our goal."