Nature | January 14, 2019 | Dalmeet Singh Chawla
The editorial board of an influential scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — has resigned in protest over the open-access policies of its publisher, Elsevier, and launched a competing publication.
The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community.
The Board members also asked Elsevier to reduce the current articles processing fee (US 1,800, plus tax) to something more appropriate. Elsevier declined to meet these demands and the editorial board for the journal resigned. With independent funding, the researchers set up a new free open access journal called Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) with MIT Press instead–see https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/qss
