<Topology>杂志编委集体辞职——长篇大论的英文

发信人: littless (littless), 信区: Science
标  题: <Topology>杂志编委集体辞职
发信站: 水木社区 (Fri May  4 20:55:25 2007), 站内

Editorial Board of Elsevier Journal Resigns in Protest Over Pricing. Richard Monastersky.
        The Chronicle of Higher Education 53.12 (Nov 10, 2006): pNA.

The entire editorial board of the prestigious mathematics journal Topology has resigned to protest the pricing policies of the journal's publisher, Elsevier, a giant European editorial company.

"Topology has a very high price per page," says Marc Lackenby, a member of the editorial board and a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. "Elsevier as a whole doesn't seem to be acting in the interest of the mathematical community."

The New York Sun published an article last month describing the resignations, which were announced over the summer and will take effect on December 31.

The departure of all nine members of the editorial board would end a half-century association between Oxford and the journal. Topology was started in the late 1950s by J.H.C. Whitehead, a noted Oxford mathematician. By tradition, about half of the editorial board has consisted of Oxford faculty members, says Mr. Lackenby.

He and his co-editors sent a letter on August 10 to Robert Ross, the Elsevier publisher in charge of pure-mathematics journals, announcing their resignations.

In the letter, the board members said, "We believe that the price, in combination with Elsevier's policies for pricing mathematical journals more generally, has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical-research community, and that this is likely to become increasingly serious and difficult, indeed impossible, to reverse in the future."

In a written statement released by Elsevier, the company said it "regrets the decision taken by the editorial board of Topology, but we believe it doesn't fully reflect the changes we have made over the past decade, and continue to make, which have moderated price increases and provided considerably more value for customers, in terms of both cost per article and research efficiency."

According to Mr. Lackenby, the high cost of the journal, which has an institutional price of $1,665 per year in the United States, was hurting its quality. "Many mathematicians were beginning to boycott the journal," he says. The editors had noticed a drop in the number of high-quality papers submitted for publication and also a decline in the number of mathematicians willing to serve as peer reviewers. As a result, he says, "the recent issues have been quite a bit thinner."

Mr. Lackenby said mathematicians backed the resignations. Moreover, he says, "there was an overwhelming point of view that Elsevier was exploiting the mathematical community."

Mathematicians Revolt

When Peter Woit, a lecturer in mathematics at Columbia University, posted a note about the resignations on his blog, Not Even Wrong, it attracted 49 comments, many of which expressed displeasure with Elsevier.

This is not the first time that an Elsevier publication's editorial board has revolted. In 1999 the 50-member board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned and formed a new journal, according to Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and an advocate of open-access publishing.

Mr. Suber has a blog devoted to open-access issues, and on his Web site he has listed cases in which editors have left journals to start lower-cost or free alternatives. According to Mr. Suber, Elsevier faced another uprising by topologists in 2001, when some editors of Topology and Its Applications resigned and later formed Algebraic and Geometric Topology.


Other publishers have also faced resignations, but Elsevier appears to have suffered several in mathematics. Regarding Elsevier, Mr. Suber says, "their prices are higher, and they're more aggressive in negotiating license agreements with libraries."

But, he notes, Elsevier was one of the first large publishers to allow authors to archive their prepublication manuscripts on their own Web pages.

In its statement, Elsevier noted that it now publishes more than 1,800 journals. "Given the value we provide to the academic community," the company said, "this kind of resignation has been a very rare occurrence."



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※ 来源:·水木社区 newsmth.net·[FROM: 218.56.198.*]

晕倒~~~我投降~~~

真的有够贵的啊~~~

[ 本帖最后由 Turkish_Cats 于 2007-5-4 21:23 编辑 ]

谁能说一下发身什么事么？楼上2位上个中文摘要？

贵版版主快来解决！