Journal publishing reform

This is a collection of links to information, opinion, activism, and other issues concerning the practices of research journal publishers (particularly in the mathematical sciences). Further contributions are welcome.

Pledges, boycotts, and petitions

• Research Without Walls
• Open Access Pledge
• Appel pour des négociations équilibrées avec les éditeurs de revues scientifiques - a petition concerning the bundling and pricing practices of Springer
• The Cost of Knowledge
• A petition to stop the Research Works Act

• See these tag libraries from the Open Access Tracking Project (more comprehensive after April 2009 than before):
  • oa.boycotts
  • oa.declarations
  • oa.petitions
  • oa.pledges

Blog posts and opinion pieces

• Scientific Publishing in the Internet Era Efthymios Constantinides June 17, 2008
• Comparative price of math journals, Rob Kirby, 27 May, 1997.
  • Open letter to Elsevier, Rob Kirby, 30 December, 1997.
  • 2000 data update
• One More Revolution to Make: Free Scientific Publishing, Krzysztof R. Apt, Communications of ACM, 44(5), pp. 25-28, 2001
• Fleeced?, Rob Kirby, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 2004.
• We can make a change, Gerard van der Geer, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, May 2004.
• What we can do about journal pricing, Walter Neumann, September 2005.
• Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky, Scott Aaronson, 2006
• Publishing economics harm science's credibility, Chris Lee, Ars Technica, November 2008.
• Integrity under attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing, Douglas Arnold, SIAM news, December 2009.
• What We Can Do About Science Journals, John Baez, January 24, 2011.
• What might be done about high prices of journals?, IMU blog on mathematical journals, July 12, 2011.
• The lairds of learning George Monbiot, August 29, 2011.
  • Serials crisis and corn laws, Francis Sedgemore, September 7, 2011.
• Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, George Monbiot, the Guardian, August 29, 2011.
• Peers, review your actions, Michael Taylor, Times Higher Education, September 29, 2011.
• How might we get to a new model of mathematical publishing?, Timothy Gowers, October 31, 2011.
  • A more modest proposal, Timothy Gowers, November 3, 2011.
  • A timeline of the debate initiated by this post, Peter Krautzberger, November 26, 2011.
• Academic publishers have become the enemies of science, Mike Taylor, the Guardian, January 16, 2011.
• Elsevier - my part in its downfall, Timothy Gowers, January 21, 2012.
  • Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall, Hacker News, January 21, 2012
  • One mathematician's stance against Elsevier, Reddit, January 22, 2012.
  • A response by David Clark at Elsevier, January 23, 2012.
  • Why boycott Elsevier?, Adam Harrow, January 27, 2012.
• The cost of knowledge, Timothy Gowers, January 23, 2012.
  • The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier, Hacker News, January 23, 2012.
  • Ban Elsevier, John Baez, January 26, 2012.
  • Boycott Elsevier!, Scott Aaronson, January 26, 2012.
  • The cost of knowledge, Terence Tao, January 26, 2012.
  • Scientists organize Elsevier boycott, Slashdot, January 27, 2012.
  • Blog blast births boffin boycott of publisher Elsevier, Iain Thomson, the Register, January 28, 2012.
  • Elsevier's Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke, Tim Worstall, Forbes, 28 January, 2012.
  • Publisher's wars, Peter Cameron, 29 January 2012.
  • Scientists boycott Elsevier, Metafilter, 29 January 2012.
  • Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire David Dobbs, Wired, 30 January 2012.
  • Thinking about Elsevier replacements, David Speyer, 30 January 2012.
  • Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics, Josh Fischman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 January, 2012.
• Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers, Mike Taylor, SV-POW, January 27, 2012.
• Why I chose to decline an invitation to review by Elsevier, Stephen Curry, January 28, 2012.
• What's wrong with electronic journals, Tim Gowers, January 29, 2012.

Media

• PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access, Jim Giles, Nature, January 25, 2007. Summary: A coalition of scientific publishers (including Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society) organises to oppose open access.
• Reed Elsevier makes its final farewell to arms, Katie Allen, the Guardian, 30 May 2008. Summary: Reed Elsevier was until 2009 organizing arms trade fairs.
• Elsevier Published 6 Fake Journals, Bob Grant, The Scientist, 7 May 2009. Summary: Elsevier was paid by unnamed pharmaceutical companies to publish six journals that looked like independent peer-reviewed medical journals, but which were not.
  • The wikipedia page on these six journals.
  • The Elsevier fake-journal tally eventually rose to nine.
• Elsevier Won't Pay for Praise, Scott Jashik, Inside Higher Ed, 23 June, 2009. Summary: Elsevier suspends its practice of offering Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give their textbooks a five-star rating.

Other Information

• On Elsevier
  • Reed Elsevier's 2009 report Elsevier reported a profit of 1.1 billion dollars on revenue of 3.2 billion dollars
  • Criticism and controversies of Elsevier (Wikipedia)
  • Elsevier support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (Gizmodo)
    • List of organizations with official stances on the Stop Online Piracy Act (Wikipedia)
  • Elsevier support for the Research Works Act (RWA) (Michael Nielsen)
    • Elsevier needs to get out more (Richard Poynder)
    • Elsevier = evil (Phyrangula)
    • Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research (Michael Eisen)
      • A response by Tom Reller (Vice President and Head of Global Corporate Relations at Elsevier)
    • Note however that the editorial board of the Lancet, a very prestigious medical journal published by Elsevier, has come out strongly against the Research Works Act.
• Elsevier submission to the Office of Science and Technology Policy on open access, January 2012.
  • Why commercial publishers are good for research, Arie Jongejan, CEO Science & Technology, Elsevier, Autumn 2003

• On open access
  • Open Access
  • Open Access Directory
  • Open Access Overview (Peter Suber)

• On scholarly journals
  • The serials crisis Judith Panitch and Sarah Michalak, A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation, January, 2005
  • AMS Journal Price Survey
  • Math Journal Price Survey, from 2008 data
  • Journal subscription prices have increased far more rapidly than either inflation or spending on research
  • Open access journal business models (from the Open Access Directory)

• Miscellaneous links
  • The Crisis in Scientific Publishing - a collection of links hosted by the University of Maryland.

Elsevier mathematics journals

This list is taken from here

• Acta Mathematica Scientia
• Advances in Applied Mathematics
• Advances in Engineering Software
• Advances in Mathematics
• Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré (C) Analyse Non Linéaire
• Annals of Pure & Applied Logic
• Annual Reviews in Control
• Applied & Computional Harmonic Analysis
• Applied Mathematical Modelling
• Applied Mathematics & Computation
• Applied Mathematics Letters
• Applied Numerical Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Automatica
• Biometric Technology Today
• Biosystems
• Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques
• Chaos, Solitons & Fractals
  • There was a significant amount of controversy regarding the quality control at this journal during the tenure of a past editor-in-chief, who stepped down in 2009. Unfortunately, most of the primary reporting on this has been taken down due to ongoing litigation.
  • The Wikipedia section on this issue
  • Nature journal libel case begins, Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, November 11, 2011.
• Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation
• Comptes Rendus Mathematique
• Computational Geometry
• Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
• Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering
• Computers & Mathematics with Applications
• Control Engineering Practice
• Differential Geometry and its Applications
• Discrete Applied Mathematics
• Discrete Mathematics
• Discrete Optimization
• Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics
• Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science
• Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements
• Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
• European Journal of Combinatorics
• European Journal of Operational Research
• Expositiones Mathematicae
• Finite Fields and their Applications
• Fuzzy Sets and Systems
• Historia Mathematica
• Indagationes Mathematicae
• Information Sciences
• International Journal of Forecasting
• International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics
• Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées
• Journal of Algebra
• Journal of Algorithms
  • Editorial board resignation, 13 December 2003
• Journal of Applied Logic
• Journal of Approximation Theory
• Journal of Combinatorial Theory, series A
• Journal of Combinatorial Theory, series B
• Journal of Complexity
• Journal of Computational & Applied Mathematics
• Journal of Computer and System Sciences
• Journal of Differential Equations
• Journal of Discrete Algorithms
• Journal of Econometrics
• Journal of Functional Analysis
• Journal of Geometry and Physics
• Journal of Mathematical Analysis & Applications
• Journal of Mathematical Economics
• Journal of Multivariate Analysis
• Journal of Number Theory
• Journal of Process Control
• Journal of Pure & Applied Algebra
• Journal of Statistical Planning & Inference
• Journal of the Franklin Institute
• Journal of the Korean Statistical Society
• Linear Algebra and its Applications
• Mathematical and Computer Modelling
• Mathematical Biosciences
• Mathematical Social Science
• Mathematics and Computers in Simulation
• Neural Networks
• Nonlinear Analysis
• Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems
• Nonlinear Analysis: Real world applications
• Operations Research Letters
• Pattern Recognition
• Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
• Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
• Simulation Modelling Practice & Theory
• Statistical Methodology
• Statistics and Probability Letters
• Stochastic Processes and their Applications
• Systems & Control Letters
• Topology
  • Editorial board resignation letter, 10 August 2006
  • A Rebellion Erupts Over Journals Of Academia, Gary Shapiro, New York Sun, 26 October, 2006.
  • Wikipedia page on the journal
  • This journal was discontinued in 2012.
• Topology & its Applications

Open Access mathematics journals

• This list is taken from the Directory of Open Access Journals (limited to peer-reviewed journals).
  • Perhaps someone could spell out or cut/paste the two DOAJ lists below, like the Elsevier list above.

• In mathematics

• In statistics