Friends,
"Crucial aims of scholarly publishing are not well served by commercial
publishing," say the editors of a leading philosophy journal. Please see
what I just received
from .
Another mass resignation at a Wiley journal as the editors and all of the
editorial board members of one of the most influential journals in moral
and political philosophy, Philosophy & Public Affairs, have resigned en
masse
https://dailynous.com/2024/05/22/editors-at-philosophy-will-launch-new-oa-jo....
This makes 11 journal mass resignations at Wiley since 2018 according to
the Retraction Watch Mass Resignation List
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-mass-resignations-list/.
As the Daily Nous says according to their statement, *crucial aims of
scholarly journals are “not well-served by commercial publishing* ... The
outgoing editors and editorial board members will be launching a new diamond
https://www.coalition-s.org/diamond-open-access/ open-access journal to
be published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH)
https://www.openlibhums.org/, and will be occupying at the new journal
the same positions they held at *Philosophy & Public Affairs*.”
You can read the statement at the links above, it includes this familiar
opening: "Faced with this conflict between purpose and business model, we
have decided to embrace the purpose and move to an alternative model. The
alternative—which our librarian colleagues have been urging for some
time—is for libraries, universities, and other academic institutions to
offer direct support for the publication of open-access journals, which are
guided by independent scholarly judgment and freely available for authors
and readers"
****
It is indeed sad that at a time when enlightened editors of many journals
starting from Fields medalist Timothy Gowers, who initiated the 'Boycott
Elsevier' movement, are urging scientists to move away from commercial
journals, we in India are entering into Transformative agreements with
commercial publishers and helping them tighten their stranglehold on
science and scholarship. A few months ago representatives of a commercial
publisher was even given a red carpet welcome in New Delhi and their 'bus
trip' to 15 leading institutions was facilitated so they could talk to
professors and students on topics like writing research papers,
presentation of data and scholarly communication!
With best wishes,
Subbiah Arunachalam
