The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, February 9, 2004
 
Editorial Board of Scientific Journal Quits, Accusing Elsevier of
Price-Gouging

By BROCK READ

The Board of Directors of a scholarly journal popular with computer
scientists and mathematicians has resigned en masse, accusing its
distributor, Elsevier, of making the publication too expensive for
many college libraries to afford.

In a statement issued to readers, members of the board of the Journal
of Algorithms announced that they would now devote their attention to
a new journal, to be called Transactions on Algorithms. The new
journal will be published by the Association for Computer Machinery,
which distributes a number of similar periodicals.

There is no timetable for the debut of the new publication, but the
departing directors said they hope to make it available at a much
lower price than what Elsevier charged for the Journal of
Algorithms. In 2003, a yearlong subscription to the monthly journal
cost $700 -- an increase of more than $100 since Elsevier started
publishing it, in 2001.

In an October letter to the directors, who functioned as the editorial
board, Donald E. Knuth, an editor of the journal and emeritus
professor of computer science at Stanford University, argued that the
publication could reach a broad base of academic libraries only if it
switched to a cheaper commercial publisher or a nonprofit one.

Zvi Galil, another editor of the journal and dean of the school of
engineering and applied science at Columbia University, said that
Elsevier had increased the subscription rates unnecessarily, because
production costs for the journal had not risen recently. "Basically,
we do all the work," Mr. Galil said, "and the company makes all the
profit."

In a statement of its own, Elsevier attributed the board's resignation
to "an unresolved dispute concerning the commercial aspects of
scientific publishing."  Company representatives declined to comment
further.

Elsevier intends to keep the journal alive under new leadership,
according to Eric Merkel Sobotta, a spokesman for the Anglo-Dutch
publishing company.  Submitted papers that have not yet appeared in
the journal will be refereed by the departing editorial board until
new members are chosen, he said. The publication's three chief editors
will continue to oversee it until the summer.

Mass resignation might be an extreme tactic, but a growing number of
editors worry that inflated costs will keep their journals from
reaching a scholarly audience, said Daniel Greenstein, librarian for
systemwide planning at the University of California. "We're seeing a
lot more of this happening as faculty begin to understand their role
in the commercial aspect of the journal business," he said.