In what has become a familiar refrain, more than 30 editors and advisors of an economics journal have resigned because they felt the publisher’s need for growth would increase the “risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.”
In a letter uploaded to Dropbox on February 7, the editors and advisors of the Journal of Economic Surveys said: “We no longer believed that the corporate policies and practices of the Journal’s publisher, Wiley, as we perceived them through several statements made by Wiley and the draft of a new editor agreement submitted to the attention of Editors-in-Chief and Managing Editors by Wiley, were coherent with ours.”
Despite involving a lawyer, the now-former editors said:
The non-negotiable documentation submitted to our analysis 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.
In a statement through a spokesperson to Retraction Watch, Allyn Molina, Wiley’s vice president of publishing development. said the company was “grateful to the leadership and dedication of the former Editors who created a strong foundation.” The journal offers an open access option, for a fee of more than $4,000 per article. But Molina said “this journal does not have any open access publishing targets.”
She continued:
Wiley proposed increasing publication output by 4% over the prior year as a goal rather than a requirement. In absolute terms, that’s an increase of 2 additional articles per year. This is supported by significant growth in submissions and a trend of emerging topics in the field.
Les Oxley, one of the two former managing editors in chief of the journal, said he and his colleagues had “have no comment to make” on Wiley’s statement.
The mass resignation joins a growing list of more than two dozen such episodes, as academic researchers battle for-profit journal publishing companies. Quoting public statements by Wiley, the editors wrote:
Wiley’s performance metrics for journals are “growth in submissions” and “growth in published articles”; Wiley also appears ready to affirm that “it’s all driven by volume ultimately”.
The company, the editors wrote, again quoting public statements, “considers it ‘important to keep authors at the center of journal strategy’” and “has an ‘Open Access (‘pay to publish’)’ business model and a ‘Cascade strategy of finding initially rejected articles another more appropriate home within Wiley’s portfolio.’”
Wiley told Retraction Watch:
We regularly take steps to ensure our journals are best serving the needs of the academic community. Over time, this means updating our editorial and production processes to improve the author experience, ensuring our workflows meet the needs of authors, librarians and funders, and bolstering processes to safeguard research integrity. Editors are key to making these changes happen, and our goal is always to reach common ground on changes that support the long-term success of the journal. We recognize that not all Editors will embrace these changes, and where compromise cannot be reached, it is sometimes in our mutual interest to part ways.
The publisher said it “will work with the succeeding editorial team to carry on that legacy.”
We are currently working with members of the board and wider community to recruit new leadership for the journal. This is a fully transparent process that includes advertising and recruiting within the wider field. In partnership with the new editorial team, we plan to introduce best practice editorial workflows and broaden the journal’s scope to reflect new and emerging fields.
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That “growing list” seems like an important and useful link and I’m going to write it out here:
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-mass-resignations-list/
I appreciate this type of posting. Not that I have any illusions about Wiley, but this is a useful process. That academics by and large continue to contribute to their inflated profit margins with unpaid labor is sad, but I hope that this will gradually become a relic of the past. I do not look for any significant improvement from the side of the publisher, just a gradual parting of the ways. Or “gradually, then suddenly” as the saying goes.
Allyn Molina is a woman. It should be ‘she continued’.
Fixed, thanks.
Sleuths should focus more on Wiley and Hindawi. Although these publishers (now both merged as Wiley) try their best to clear their name and clean their journals, they still struggle a lot with fraud and incompetence. Their most nasty problem is their lack of good editors, good reviewers, and good staff. Lots and lots of incompetent people are in those Wiley and Hindawi journals.
And in an ecosystem of idiots, if a competent scientist wants to do real, quality work, the rest cannot synchronize with him/her and the outlier will be eventually not tolerated and thus removed. This makes the idiotic ecosystem self-sustaining and anti-improvement.
I intended to purchase Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry 7th edition print version at some point this year or next year, as it is a very expensive encyclopedia of books I was hoping to buy directly through the Wiley sales website instead of buying through Amazon to avoid the risk of a seller sending the encyclopedia with damage during transportation, Amazon is famous for damaging books during transportation, unfortunately the publisher Wiley removed this encyclopedia printed version for sale from their website, this being the largest industrial chemistry reference that It has been published for over 100 years, now they only have Kirk Othmer available for printing, which is more expensive than Ullmann’s and I saw the PDF version of Ullmann’s, liking it more than Kirk Othmer, mainly due to the greater number of figures, 22,000 for to be more exact in the printed version, I know that there is a version of this encyclopedia to download for free on the internet but at least the latest online edition does not have all the figures that are in the printed version, the Wiley publisher could continue to sell Ullmann’s printed in Instead of just Kirk Othmer, unfortunately the publisher is leaving something to be desired, they release several new books that are mostly rubbish while great works like Ullmann’s are no longer printed. It’s a shame that I won’t be able to fulfill my dream of purchasing this encyclopedia safely directly through Wiley, I will have to depend on Amazon sellers.