The entire editorial board of a semantics journal owned by Springer Nature has resigned to launch a new one, citing pressure from the company to increase their annual publication volume by 25%.
All 28 editors at Natural Language Semantics resigned from the journal in early April, editor-in-chief Amy Rose Deal, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Retraction Watch.
In a May 19 open letter, five of the resigning editors announced the launch of their new journal, Semantics of Natural Languages. The new journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities, an open-access publisher whose goal “is to liberate university research from commercial control,” according to its website.
The journal is the fourth mass resignation we’ve reported this year and joins more than 50 others on our Mass Resignations list. The Open Library of Humanities launched another linguistics journal, Glossa, following a mass resignation from an Elsevier journal in 2015.
The new journal’s editorial board includes almost all of the former Natural Language Semantics editors.
Caroline Edwards, executive director at the Open Library of Humanities, wrote on June 2 the journal launch “follows ongoing concerns about Springer Nature putting pressure on editors to accept and publish more articles.”
“Commercial publishers like Springer Nature are increasingly using this tactic to grow the revenue they receive for open access publishing via Article Processing Charges,” the announcement reads.
Deal told us the publisher gave the editors an “ultimatum: either we immediately increase the number of papers we publish annually by about 25%, or they would ‘merge’ the journal with another Springer-owned title.” The journal has published an average of 12 articles per year over the last 10 years.
“We have always understood this ‘merger’ to mean that our journal would cease to exist,” she said.
According to the Natural Language Semantics website, the journal will close at the end of 2026.
“This was not an easy decision to make, but the journal is ultimately not viable as a stand-alone title,” the announcement reads. “Authors may consider submitting their work to Linguistics & Philosophy instead,” another Springer Nature title.
A spokesperson for Springer Nature told us the decision to close the journal was not related to the editors resigning. The move “followed a careful and thorough review conducted over several months, which concluded in early May,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson did not respond to our question regarding the former editors’ concerns about increased publication rate.
“The deeper cause is that we believe in true open access, which for-profit publishers like Springer are not willing or able to provide,” Deal told us.
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