I am a coauthor (one of many) of a blog post written in response to a letter by publishers and learned societies to the President of the United States. Read it on Medium.

The December 2019 issue of the New Zealand Mathematical Society newsletter will contain a concise article called Research publishing for the nonexpert. I hope this will be a useful mix of commentary, links and concrete suggestions for a variety of actors in the scholarly publication system.

Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics has been published by Springer since 1992. It was founded by Chris Godsil, Ian Goulden, and David Jackson. It has been a well regarded specialised journal.

In June 2017 the four editors-in-chief gave notice to Springer that they would resign at the end of the year. The entire editorial board (except for two members who decided to retire on the grounds of age) followed the EiCs to a new home. The new title is Algebraic Combinatorics, currently published by Centre Mersenne. Note that this journal is run according to the Fair Open Access Principles, so that any subsequent change of publisher will not require a change in the title of the journal.

Springer is attempting to continue the old title J. Algebraic Combinatorics with new editors. I know of many people from the algebraic combinatorics research community who were approached and refused. Eventually Ilias Kotsireas has accepted the offer to be EiC, despite explicitly being asked not to by the former EiCs.

The entire editorial board of Algebraic Combinatorics, including the 4 current EiCs, consists of 43 people. JACo, on the other hand, has 15 including 4 Advisory Editors.. The new editors of JACo have very little to do with the subject of algebraic combinatorics. Using the American Mathematical Society’s invaluable (and paywalled) resource MathSciNet, we can look for at papers written by various editors, having either primary or secondary classification 05E (Algebraic Combinatorics). We find the following data for JACo.

• EiC – Kotsireas 0
• Advisory board (4 people) 1
• Editors (10 people) 9

However for AlCo:

• EiCs (4 people) 69
• Editorial board (4 of 39, almost randomly selected) 110

AlCo has published 12 papers since January 2018 and received 140 submissions since July 2017.  According to one of the EiCs, the quality of submissions has risen since the move from Springer (although some subfields have reduced in quantity, which he attributed to authors waiting until AlCo is fully indexed).

It is completely clear that Algebraic Combinatorics is the continuation of the original journal founded in 1992, and the journal currently called JACo is a “zombie”.

Kotsireas’ recent editorial states: “…the research area of algebraic combinatorics is vibrant enough to sustain two high- quality journals”.

The obvious response is: “Why not set up a new journal elsewhere if there is so much room in the market?” If there were room, why didn’t Springer, or the new editors, do this? It seems clear that they only seek to use the reputation created by the old editors (and authors and reviewers) to improve their own personal standing, at the expense of the research field they purport to represent. Whatever that research field is, it seems that it is not really algebraic combinatorics.

Kotsireas also says: “I would like to thank the previous Editors- in Chief of JACO, with whom we had a very professional, productive, cordial and effective collaboration, during the transition period.”

This ignores the fact that the following message was received from Springer by the EiCs, who had agreed to work until 31 Dec 2017 and to see through all papers in their editorial queue.

“Due to the fact that a competing journal in 2017 (Algebraic Combinatorics) has been formulated which comprises the board of JACO, Ilias Kotsireas will be installed as an EIC as of Sunday October 15.  It is also our understanding that current EICs of JACO (or at least some of you) will also become EICs of board members of Algebraic Combinatorics in 2018. Due to these extraordinary circumstances, we want Ilias Kotsireas to have final input on the acceptance and rejection of all articles that are in process until the end of your terms on December 31. If you feel you cannot comply with this measure and cooperate fully with Illias on the disposition of all papers, then it is best to part ways at this point and terminate your contracts early.”

Personally, I find this to be inconsistent with the description by Kotsireas. The fact that the original editors of JACo did not cause problems when presented with a fait accompli is not the same as having a “very professional, productive, cordial and effective collaboration, during the transition period.”

At first sight, it seems that it would have been so much easier for Springer to just agree to Fair Open Access, and publish the journal at a reasonable price. But the business model of such big commercial publishers involves running down the reputational capital generated by decades of work by authors, editors and reviewers, and investing as little as possible, and maintaining huge profit margins. Why work for a living if you can be a rentier capitalist? The company founded in 1842 by Julius Springer had a long history of service to the mathematical community, but, like journals such as JACo, the current entity usually called “Springer” bears little relation to the original entity. Since its takeover by Bertelsmann in 1998 it has gone through several incarnations, currently being called SpringerNature after a merger in 2015.

My guess is that the current JACo EiC is being paid about $8000-10000 per year, getting another CV item, and perhaps getting local recognition at his institution, so motivation there is clear. Exactly what the advisory board members and some associate editors, distinguished mathematicians from other fields, think they are doing is very unclear to me. I call on them to let the title die a natural death. Clear public statements by senior members of the algebraic combinatorics community are desirable. And the founding editors should insist on their names being removed from the JACo site. They founded a journal, and it continues under a new name, with them as editorial board members. The zombie journal must die.

The AOASG blog carries a piece by me and Alex Holcombe, which can be read below (minus hyperlinks, so please look at the AOASG version for best reading).

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In March 2017 a group of researchers and librarians interested in journal reform formalized the Fair Open Access Principles.

The basic principles are:

• The journal has a transparent ownership structure, and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community.
• Authors of articles in the journal retain copyright.
• All articles are published open access and an explicit open access licence is used.
• Submission and publication is not conditional in any way on the payment of a fee from the author or its employing institution, or on membership of an institution or society.
• Any fees paid on behalf of the journal to publishers are low, transparent, and in proportion to the work carried out.

Detailed clarification and interpretation of the principles is provided at the site.

Here, instead, we put these principles into context and explain the motivation behind them.

Our basic thesis is that the current situation in which commercial publishers own the title to journals is untenable. Many existing journals were begun by scholars but subsequently acquired by Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and other commercial publishers. These publishers now have a strong incentive to oppose any reform of the journal that would benefit the community of authors, editors and readers but not help the short-term interests of its own shareholders. We have seen several examples of this in recent years (the Wikipedia entry for Elsevier, for example, collects many examples of malfeasance.

The evidence is now overwhelming that the interests of large commercial publishers are not well aligned with the interests of the research community or the general public. Thus Principle 1 is key. Changing a journal to open access but allowing it to be bought easily by Elsevier, for example, would be a pointless exercise. We must decouple ownership of journals from publication services. This will allow editorial boards to shop around for publishers, who must compete on price and service quality rather than exploit a monopolistic position. In other words, a functioning market will arise. Also, journals will have more chance to innovate by not being locked into inflexible and outdated infrastructure.

Principle 2 (authors retaining copyright) seems obvious. Large publishers have claimed that having authors assign them copyright to articles protects the authors. We know of no case where this has happened. However, publishers have prevented authors from reusing their own work!

Open access is of course the main goal and thus the associated principle (Principle 3) needs little explanation. Some authors appear to believe that posting occasional preprints/postprints on their own website is as good as true open access. This is not the case – some of the reasons are licence issues, confusion about the version of record, lack of machine readability, inconsistent searchability, and unreliable archiving.

APCs (Article Processing Charges) are a common feature of open access journals and a main source of income, particularly for “predatory” journals whose sole function is to make money for unscrupulous owners. Large commercial publishers have responded to pressure by offering OA if an APC is paid. These APCs are typically well over US$1000. The fact that over 60% of journals in DOAJ do not charge any APC, and the low APCs of some high quality newer full service publishers (such as Ubiquity Press) shows that there is much room for improvement. In many fields there is considerable resistance to authors paying APCs directly. For example in a recent survey of mathematicians that we undertook, published in the European Mathematical Society Newsletter,
about a quarter of respondents declared APCs unacceptable in principle and another quarter said they should be paid by library consortia. We do not deny that there are costs associated with OA publishing, and are not advocating every journal run using self-hosted OJS and volunteer time (although there are many successful and long-lived journals of that type, like Journal of Machine Learning Research or Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, and we feel it still has untapped potential). We aim to ensure that unnecessary barriers are not erected for authors, in particular fees – Principle 4. Any payments on behalf of authors should be made in an automatic way – the idea is for consortia of institutions to fund reasonable operating costs of OA journals directly.

Principle 5 (reasonable and transparent costs) will automatically hold if the journal is sufficiently well run and independent as described by Principle 1, and is included in order to reinforce the point that a competitive market is our main goal rather than wasting public money to maintain the current profits of publishers. Recently, initiatives such as OA2020 have emphasized large-scale conversion of subscription journals to OA. We believe that if the ownership of the journals isn’t simultaneously changed, there will remain little incentive for publishers to keep prices down. If a researcher believes that a paper in Nature will make her career, will she be denied this by the APC-paying agency if Nature choose to charge a premium APC? In addition, if journal ownership is not taken from the publishers, they can lock us into their existing technologies, which hinders innovation in scholarly communication.

We are presently working on disciplinary organizations aimed at helping journals flip from a subscription model to Fair OA, and have so far started LingOA, MathOA and PsyOA. We plan a Fair Open Access Alliance which will include independent journals already practising FairOA principles, flipped journals, and other institutional members with a strong belief in FairOA. The idea is to share resources and harmonize journal practices. We hope that these activities will yield a way forward that avoids sterile debates about Green vs Gold OA. We welcome feedback and offers of help in our wider effort to convert the entire scholarly literature to Fair Open Access.