The co-editors in chief and most editorial board members of the journal Critical Public Health have resigned their roles to start a new, independent journal, citing differences with their publisher, Taylor & Francis.
“While there are inevitable tensions for a critically oriented scholarly journal that is also a commodity marketed by a commercial publisher, over the last year or so it has become increasingly difficult to hold together these two different versions of the journal,” co-editors Judith Green of the University of Exeter in the UK and Lindsay McLaren of the University of Calgary in Canada said in a press release announcing the mass resignation.
“It is simply a relationship that hasn’t worked out and we need to find other ways to continue the spirit of the community,” McLaren told us.
Earlier this year, the entire editorial boards of the open-access Elsevier journals NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports resigned to start a new, non-profit journal after the publisher rebuffed their request to reduce the journals’ fees for authors to publish their work. Editors of another Elsevier journal, Design Studies, have also threatened to resign following the publisher replacing the editor-in-chief and pushing the editorial team to publish more papers.
The press release and resignation letter from the Critical Public Health editors posted online cited a 2021 editorial by Green, McLaren, and two other board members discussing the history of the journal and consolidation in the academic publishing industry that led to Taylor & Francis owning the journal. They also cited the publisher “pushing” the editors to move the journal from a hybrid subscription/open-access model to a fully open-access model funded by charging fees to authors.
The editors opposed that change. Charging authors to publish their work “risks compounding existing inequalities,” they wrote, and “goes against the entire spirit of the journal,” which was founded to create “a space to challenge public health orthodoxies, shifting the centre and breaking new ground.”
However, the editors wrote:
Taylor & Francis have made it clear that the choice is ultimately theirs to make, and the Editorial Board’s agreement is not a necessary precondition to changes in how CPH is funded. This move suggests that Taylor & Francis see the journal as a commodity separable from the intellectual community that produces it.
The resignation letter stated that current fees for authors to publish their work as open-access were £2700 per research article (nearly $3,500), which the editors described as:
an unsustainable cost for research funders and university libraries in high income countries, and an impossible cost for many in less advantaged countries; occasional subsidies do not constitute a viable solution to the much deeper issues of inequity embedded within the profit orientation.
The letter also outlined issues with a new editorial contract and amendment, which “make clear the limited role the publisher sees for the editorial team and board.”
The letter continued:
In reiterating the rights of the publisher to determine the funding model and volume of articles that will be published, we believe Taylor & Francis have significantly eroded our ability to set strategic direction. The editorial team’s ability to manage a collegial and bespoke response to authors and reviewers has also been systematically undermined by changes (typically without any consultation) to the submission platform, information about the journal, and requirements for manuscripts, and outsourcing key functions such as pre-production.
A Taylor & Francis spokesperson told us the publisher was “disappointed” by the resignations:
However, we very much look forward to recruiting a new editorial team who share our ambitions for Critical Public Health to extend its relevance and influence for the community it serves. We thank the outgoing board for their dedication to the journal and additionally thank the editors, Judith Green and Lindsay McLaren, for agreeing to stay on in an acting capacity until the current volume has been completed. This will ensure researchers can continue to submit papers as usual and for Critical Public Health to continue its valuable role in areas of public health, health promotion, political economy of health, and related fields.
Critical Public Health’s impact factor in 2022, as well as over the past five years, was 2.8, placing it in the top half for its category.
The editors who resigned from Critical Public Health have started a new publication, the Journal of Critical Public Health, hosted by the University of Calgary and owned by the Critical Public Health Network, a UK-based scholarly organization. An FAQ page about the resignations and new journal states that the editors hope to begin publishing content in about a year.
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Name and shame these price gouging publishers!
They just did. Taylor & Francis.
Taylor & Francis seems to have the same cavalier attitude as Elsevier. They all ‘look forward to hiring a new EIC & editorial board’. It will be interesting to track the IF of these journals where mass editorial board resignations have occurred over the next few years. Fortunately, authors have options & more & more will vote with their feet, because they have to make their grant money go longer distances. These days I would rather make sure my students are supported & have good lab supplies etc. than be able to publish their work with publishers who gouge authors.
I think it is more interesting to track the quality of the published papers, rather than the impact factor. Impact factors are petty worthless metrics.
Finally people are standing up. Hopefully there’s a knock on to even more areas. Proper predators.