Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Many SV-POW! readers will already be aware that the entire editorial staff of the Elsevier journal Lingua has resigned over the journal’s high price and lack of open access. As soon as they have worked out their contracts, they will leave en bloc and start a new open access journal, Glossa — which will in fact be the old journal under a new name. (Whether Elsevier tries to keep the Lingua ghost-ship afloat under new editors remains to be seen.)

Today I saw Elsevier’s official response, “Addressing the resignation of the Lingua editorial board“. I just want to pick out one tiny part of this, which reads as follows:

The article publishing charge at Lingua for open access articles is 1800 USD. The editor had requested a price of 400 euros, an APC that is not sustainable. Had we made the journal open access only and at the suggested price point, it would have rendered the journal no longer viable – something that would serve nobody, least of which the linguistics community.

The new Lingua will be hosted at Ubiquity Press, a well-established open-access publisher that started out as UCL’s in-house OA publishing arm and has spun off into private company. The APC at Ubiquity journals is typically £300 (€375, $500), which is less than the level that Elsevier describe as “not sustainable” (and a little over a fifth of what Elsevier currently charge).

Evidently Ubiquity Press finds it sustainable.

You know what’s not sustainable? Dragging around the carcass of a legacy barrier-based publisher, with all its expensive paywalls, authentication systems, Shibboleth/Athens/Kerberos integration, lawyers, PR departments, spin-doctors, lobbyists, bribes to politicians, and of course 37.3% profit margins.

The biggest problem with legacy publishers? They’re just a waste of money.