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Another editorial team revolts against Wiley journal policies: Journal of Economic Surveys

The statement from the editors is here:  Download Public statement Resignations from the Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic Surveys (final).  From the statement:

The…documentation submitted to our analysis [by Wiley] appeared to emphasize quantity over quality of the papers submitted and strongly favoured cross pollination among the various Wiley publications also in relation to papers that we would have not considered favourably for the Journal of Economic Surveys increasing – in our perception – risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.

For earlier coverage, see this from the editor of P&PA, and this comment from David Velleman on an earlier thread:

The initial hope behind the academic OA movement — at least at Philosophers' Imprint, which was the first OA journal in Philosophy — was that universities would cut commercial publishers out of the knowledge-dissemination business entirely, by redirecting the funds traditionally spent on paper-and-ink journals (including not only subscriptions but selection, binding, storage, etc.) to in-house OA publishing operations. We were encouraged in this hope by our librarian colleagues at the University of Michigan, who were on the leading edge of digital librarianship at the time. We wanted the academic world to become, insofar as possible, self-sufficient in the dissemination of academic work. If academic libraries had gradually moved their periodicals departments into OA publishing, it might have worked.  Unfortunately, the commercial publishers quickly captured the OA market and turned it into a source of profits, and most academic institutions made no effort to participate in the work of disseminating scholarship. Looking back, we can see that our vision would have required some central coordination as well as central funding for the transition. We were too idealistic — or perhaps I should say, too soft-headed.

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12 responses to “Another editorial team revolts against Wiley journal policies: Journal of Economic Surveys”

  1. Publishing Veteran

    David Velleman’s phrase “soft-headed” is, I’m afraid, all too accurate.

    The OA movement was driven by librarians, whose ressentiment against commercial publishing firms was so passionate that it managed to seduce many in the professoriate who should have been exercising the critical thinking skills that they are so adept in instilling in the young.

    What librarians do is spend money that others give them on products and services that others create. They have no experience managing creative operations themselves, and no experience generating revenues and managing costs the way an actual business has to. The idea that they could suddenly turn themselves into successful publishers was as fanciful as the idea that a university press should report into the library. The logic for this innovation in management structure seems to have been analogous to: “people who eat in restaurants a lot are the ones who should be running restaurants.”

    Academia decided a long time ago that it was going to outsource “dissemination” (in the hard sense of publication) to third parties. Just as the public has come to bewail skyrocketing higher education fees, librarians and other administrators came to bewail the increased fees charged by their vendors. This is what happens when people place themselves at the mercy of large institutional superstructures for key services. They way many in academia feel about commercial publishers is mirrored by the way the American public feels about higher education in general these days. Both industries (and that’s really what they are now) do what all industries do when faced with financial challenges: they have their customers solve their problems by giving them more money one way or another.

    What isn’t appreciated is just how expensive it is to make all the back-end technologies involved in publishing work in the digital age. Every time a university has tried to do this themselves, they have ended up exiting. Chicago had the first electronic journal platform in the 90s. They discontinued it after a few years because it was too expensive to keep it up to date. Stanford created one a few years later called HighWire. The university got tired of maintaining that for the same reasons and determined that it was “non core.” It’s owned by private equity now. These were major institutions with massive endowments, both of which decided that maintaining operations relating to just a very small slice of “research output” was prohibitively expensive.

    What’s hilariously hypocritical about this latest bit of pearl-clutching regarding Wiley is that it comes from economists, members of a self-styled “science” that has never successfully predicted anything, and whose entire output — at least as far as the dominant neoclassical/neoliberal practitioners are concerned — has been rightly characterized as pseudo-science by heterodox economists and members of other social science disciplines.

    The stock in trade of economists is maintaining that the market is the ultimate
    source of wisdom and value, and that companies exist to maximize profits for their shareholders. The people who run Wiley and other commercial firms (and a few university presses to boot) got their worldview and operating principles from such economists. I wonder if the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Surveys appreciates the irony.

  2. I'm curious what you mean by the expense of "back-end technologies". While open source platforms like OJS and Janeway lack some of the bells and whistles of the commercial platforms, and are certainly not easily scalable, OJS in particular is mature, stable, flexible, easy to use, and free, and its load on a server is minimal.

  3. I was an AE there and immediately resigned when the EIC emailed us about the situation. However, I should note that no, economists do not maintain that the market is the ultimate source of anything. It is just a sometimes efficient way to allocate scarce resources. Nothing more, nothing less.

    I don't even know any economist who would claim that science should be market-based in any way, as there are positive externalities from providing much more knowledge than a free market otherwise would.

    But that is fine. I assume philosophers don't go to economics blogs for knowledge about philosophy, so I shouldn't be bothered when philosophers get economics wrong.

  4. Publishing Veteran

    Many things considered as bells & whistles in one discipline are either viewed as standard now in others or soon will become so. OJS is very buggy, has bad search, is a bit wayward when it comes to citation formatting, and is weak when it comes to security. It's a reasonable solution if you have no resources and are starting up a new journal without a long-term plan about how it is going to survive or an audience with sophisticated expectations. There is a reason why an established medical society, for example, would never use it. It's great for librarians, but there is a reason why no major academic/scientific societies would consider using it.

  5. Publishing Veteran says:

    "What librarians do is spend money that others give them on products and services that others create. They have no experience managing creative operations themselves, and no experience generating revenues and managing costs the way an actual business has to. The idea that they could suddenly turn themselves into successful publishers was as fanciful as the idea that a university press should report into the library. The logic for this innovation in management structure seems to have been analogous to: “people who eat in restaurants a lot are the ones who should be running restaurants.”

    This is a fallacious analogy. The idea of OA was never that librarians would become "successful publishers" in the sense of "generating revenues" from publishing. The point was that making research available to readers is and will always be a cost center, and the question is how the costs should most efficiently be met. The appropriate analogy is to another cost center in universities — namely, teaching. Universities could, in principle, out-source their teaching to profit-making businesses like Kaplan. But we regard in-person transmission of knowledge to be part of the proper business of universities, belonging on the cost side of the ledger. The question is what part of knowledge distribution, as performed by for-profit publishers, is not already represented among our proper costs.

    Now, when the technology of knowledge distribution required typesetting, printing, binding, and physical distribution of copies, it made sense to engage profit making businesses to perform those functions, which required industrial rather than academic materials and expertise. But the Internet has done away with most of the industrial side of knowledge distribution, which now piggy-backs on technology that has become the backbone of instruction. Today, the same technology we use to teach can be used to distribute our research to the entire world. Why, then, are we still using profit-making businesses who have no resources or expertise that our own institutions don't already have as part of their core function?

    (I apologize in advance for any hysterically hypocritical pearl-clutching in the above.)

  6. The open access program at the MIT Press seems like an important model to consider here. If I understand the arrangement correctly, participating libraries pay a recurring fee that is used to support universal open access even for those at non-participating institutions. Here are some details: https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open-model.

  7. Most of the bells and whistles are irrelevant for noncommercial journals, eg analytics, advertising, and payment collection. I've just stepped down as eic of a journal that has been running on OJS for over 10 years, never had a problem with search (via google), indexing (incl. scopus), or security. Medical societies aren't going to use it because they want to charge both the authors and readers, it isn't a good platform for that. For a Diamond OA journal in an A&S field it is fine.

  8. Librarian here. Publishing Veteran's characterization of librarian, libraries, and OA is, in my experience, far wide of the mark. Librarians are not generally hostile to commercial publishers. We like to cultivate good business relationships with our vendors. On occasion an outlier case will force libraries to take a stand, an example being the worldwide stand against Elsevier as journal prices sky-rocketed, which concluded with new agreements to the satisfaction of both the libraries and the publisher. Librarians' values align with OA in so far as OA, like libraries, promote widespread access to information. The "movement" has certainly been supported by librarians, but it was "driven" by scholars themselves. Take, for example, Public Library of Science (PLOS) was founded by three academic scientists. It's dubbed "Library" not because libraries initiated it, but because the founders envisioned "the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form."

  9. Any assessment of publishing platforms today (workflows, UI, UX, stability, etc.) demonstrates that the under investment in "commercial platforms" by their "commercial owners" has led to the open source solutions rapidly catch and in some cases over take their propriatary solution competitors. The open community has been extraordinarily active in developing Janeway and PKP's OJS. Whilst they may be pigeon-holed as solutions for libraries and institutions and "not easily scalable" I did read this week that OJS had installations with over 100 journals on it. Performing the role of platforms for collections of whole nations. Both Janeway and OJS now our perform commercial solutions and there doesn't seem to be any lack of bells and whistles as described.

  10. I am a librarian who turned (back) to the profession after deciding to give up the pursuit of an academic career following the completion of my PhD. I can be quite critical of my fellow colleagues, especially when they seem to be out of touch with the communities they are supposed to serve or lack a certain amount of pragmatism. However, I find this statement from "Publishing Veteran" clearly problematic: "The idea that they [libraries] could suddenly turn themselves into successful publishers was as fanciful as the idea that a university press should report into the library." Historically, many *American university presses originated in libraries*; these presses were later spun off. Those presses that have "returned" to the library (see University of Michigan) have often been quite well thought out and successful. For more about this history, I recommend: http://www.doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2017-0037.

  11. Thanks for the link, Joshua. It generates a 404, but only because of the terminal period. Here it is clean:

    https://doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2017-0037

  12. Buried in this thread is probably not the best place to have a general discussion of the merits of OA, of open source publishing platforms, or of library-supported presses. We've had these discussions in other threads, and there do seem to be one or two regular readers of leiterreports who for their own reasons seem adamantly opposed to the whole enterprise. All I can say is that most of the arguments they bring do not reflect my experience with my journal, or issues I've seen discussed in forums where most of the participants are editors of similar journals. There are certainly impediments to getting a quality noncommercial journal up and running, but most of the genuine issues are not with anything structural like the platform, or having libraries backing the journal.

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