APLU In The News

The editors and editorial board members of the linguistics journal Lingua have stoked antipublisher sentiment with their highly publicized protest against Elsevier. But judging by past revolts, turning their popularity into editorial success for their new journal, Glossa, could be a challenge. Open-access advocates, meanwhile, see the conflict as an opportunity to further their cause.

As reported in Inside Higher Education, there is evidence of fed-up academics taking a harder line against increasing journal prices: “All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to…

It was the kind of exit designed to make a statement. Last week all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The announcement re-energized concerns about the relationship between academics and for-profit companies, and the future of scholarly publishing.

Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, issued a statement Monday expressing strong support for the move of the six editors and 31 editorial board members of Lingua, a top linguistics journal, to resign to protest Elsevier pricing. The protest has attracted considerable attention among advocates for open-access publishing (in which…