Why don't high-ranking journals go solo?

Question

There are so many debates and criticisms around the topic of publishers, who are accused of charging excessive fees for access when all the work of the journal is done for free by academics. But why don't some of the big journals just go independent and open access? What do publishers actually provide as a benefit?

These are some of the things that publishers might provide, but it seems to me that they are easily replaced:

Typesetting

I edited a postgraduate journal and typeset it myself on LaTeX. It looks as good as any other journal. Surely there are many students familiar with LaTeX who would typeset for not much money, especially if people submitting papers were required at the minimum to provide an endnote/bibtex file of references and use proper document styles etc.

Paywall

Obviously, this would not be a problem for open access journals.

Promotion

Do academic journal publishers really need publishers to do this? Do publishers actually do this?

Website

I design and host my website on Weebly. It looks professional and costs hardly anything.

Printing

Well it's the 21st century, so print articles out yourself or read on a tablet. If this is absolutely necessary, print on demand.

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It seems to me at least that to cover the costs of typesetting and webhosting, a journal would require hardly any money. They could raise this through a combination of charging authors (but not crazy money), donations and grants.

Either I'm missing something really important that publishers do or there is something holding back the likes of Mind (top-ranked philosophy journal) from doing this. All I could come up with was that perhaps publishers own the past content of the journal.

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UPDATE

Some great responses below. To summarise, it seems there are broadly two answers to the question:

1. Journals offer more than I and other people sometimes think (e.g. secure web hosting, submission handling, registering papers with various databases).
2. There are costs associated with trying to leave a publisher. The name of a journal can be owned by the publisher, and the impact factor etc. are all held along with that. These costs present a barrier that already overworked academics rarely consider taking on.

Answer 1

Many journals are publishers' own products, "going solo" makes no sense. It's like asking why Gmail does not segregate from Google. In some cases, professional societies hire publishers to take care of their official publishing organ, I imagine your question relates to these cases. Otherwise, there have been cases of the entire editorial board leaving for another journal, I've heard it happened to a Frontiers journal over concerns on quality, but in this case the journal is still there, just edited by other people.

Running a professional-level journal is not trivial and there are reasons to favor established organizations, commercial or not, to handle that part. These include administration, secure web hosting, a long-term back-up strategy, typesetting, distribution, submitting accurate and complete article metadata to third parties like Pubmed or Web of Science, printing when applicable, etc. and of course finding the money to do all of these.

For many editors, it's a pretty straightforward decision to outsource these hurdles to a specialized organization, be it for profit or not, especially if there is an ongoing issue-free relationship going on for years.

Answer 2

Actually, some journals do successfully go solo, just as you suggest. A nice high-profile example is the Journal of Machine Learning Research, a top-ranked journal that formed when the entire editorial board of Machine Learning resigned to create this free alternative.

This points to the main reason why traditional journals have much inertia. The reason that JMLR could work is because:

1. A large fraction of the key players in the community coordinated to make the change (thereby immediately granting the new journal a high academic reputation) and,
2. They were able to arrange sufficient support from their home institutions to bear the start-up costs of organizing the journal.

These are both difficult to arrange, requiring quite a bit of coordination and personal investment, and so it is not surprising that it is rare to happen.

Answer 3

I am going out on a limb here and disagree with Darrin. I think there are plenty of academics who would be both, capable and perfectly willing to run a university- or self-published journal. I think it is an illusion that academics want to do only research, all the time. A lot of (tenured) academics do plenty of things that require lots of time and don't directly contribute to their research, be it writing entry-level text books, maintaining scientific software, communicating their work to the broader masses through events or magazine articles, running for offices in their university or various societies, etc. etc. I fail to see how running a journal would be so different to these activities that no-one would take up the task.

The main reason, in my opinion, why this rarely (although not never) happens is because of legal issues. Most journals (and, in computer science, conferences) are mostly identified through their name, and this name is owned by whoever currently publishes it. For instance, the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) is not free to just decide that the journal now goes self-published. Sure, the editorial board can decide to jointly quit and start a new journal, but it is not guaranteed that the community would see this new journal as a continuation of TSE. Much more likely, the new journal would need to start building a reputation from scratch, which is not easy at all. TSE, in the meantime, would continue even with a completely new editorial board, because I can guarantee you that there would be many qualified new people waiting in the wings for a chance to get into the board of the most important journal in their discipline.

Answer 4

I have been thinking about starting a "startup" journal owned by academics in my discipline and it seems to me that getting community support (authors and reviewers + quality content) is by far the biggest challenge. There is a strong feedback cycle where people don't want to submit to you unless you are reputable but you cannot get reputable without good submissions.

Note that the publishers own the ISSN + name and thus the impact factor and all the prestige of the journal - you cannot "move" a journal (and publishers will not be likely to just give it away). You need to start a new one. You are IMHO correct that most of the technical aspects can now be done with little cost that could be easily covered with minor financial support from a university/society.

Another problem is that with a slightly "punk" journal (which you will be, if you do not have money) you may run into trouble getting indexed by Web of Science and thus not get impact factor, which is sadly a necessary thing to attract submissions. While there is no charge to get ISSN (ISSN guidelines) and to submit your journal contents for indexing (WoS guidelines,Scopus info), the people who review the application might be suspicious about you.

Succesful examples exist, e.g. http://www.the-cryosphere.net/ Though I am not sure the journal is completely owned by academics - it seems to be. It nevertheless started quite recently and is reasonably modern in its publishing and pricing policies.

So if you are angry about publishing, you can actually change it - but you need strong support from the community. Good ideas to improve the publication process to fit better with your field than the current one should also help.

See also this question: How is a new academic journal born

Answer 5

Typesetting, running a website, and many of your other suggestions take time and organizational skills that many academics do not want to invest in.

If you outsource all of this to a publisher it allows you to focus on other projects. Why chase money to run a journal when you need to chase money for other forms of research?

Your ideas are reasonable but few are interested in having an entrepreneurial mindset toward an academic journal.

Answer 6

There are more organisational issues than you think. Take the website for example: you say that you run one for peanuts, but is it suitable for a journal?

• is it compliant with personal data processing regulations?
• does it have a backup strategy?
• do you have your own certificate for secure connections?
• can your website process payments and/or donations?
• is it guaranteed to stay online when facing the slightest DDoS attack?

A similar list can be brought up for other tasks as well. So it's not impossible to run a free journal, but this activity is hardly compatible with full-tile research, teaching and other activities scientists already have.

Answer 7

If you own the journal's brand (which is seldom the case), this is in fact possible quickly if somebody champions it (assuming authors do their typesetting). You can also recreate a brand, but that's a big coordination problem: it requires getting enough scientists to agree that it's worthwhile in some form, which is hard, like herding cats; then each must believe enough people agree to switch. There are partial success stories, but I never see evidence they worked (did the original journals die out?) and I still see too few of them. The brand of your accepted papers is in practice your curriculum, and this motivates lots of inertia, especially when junior, untenured researchers are involved.

Here's a case study on the first possibility, which I believe to be generally relevant from my computer science subfield, the one of programming languages (PL) (where we use conferences, but this is mostly orthogonal), where the switch happened in months (after some time for discussions).

CS doesn't use arXiv so much, but pressure toward open access is rising. Most of PL publishes at ACM, except for ECOOP which is run by its own association. They had a contract with Springer. But since Springer refused to allow for open access, organizers surveyed submitters, and submitters voted overwhelmingly to switch immediately (even for already submitted articles). They switched to Gold Open Access with a 15 € open access fee.* Here's the rest of the story: http://2015.ecoop.org/track/research-track#Open-Access

The same people who organized this switch so quickly are much more cautious about ACM, exactly because ACM owns the conference brands. Also, lots supported the switch, but most of the work was done by few who cared enough for it.

On the downside, this move is good, but it didn't seem to move submissions from ACM to ECOOP—most still submit to the closest appropriate deadline, and young researchers often can't afford waiting. And of course most old papers are still behind an expensive paywall—Springer is so expensive I've never been able to get through their paywall without workarounds.

*The organizer explained that a few minor issues about metadata & C. are not handled satisfactorily by arXiv, but this is only worth 15 €, not the thousand of € asked by publishers for gold open access. Since the publishers have huge profit margins but not absurd ones, I assume traditional publishers still have huge actual costs—I don't think they fired all employees whose jobs have become irrelevant. (Not that those people should be thrown on the street without concern, but that's no reason to support publishers.)

Answer 8

These and similar things always look very simple until you try it yourself. "Why do we need professional flutists? You just blow into the flute and twiddle your fingers" is a similar sentiment.

I'm going to focus only on high-ranking journals. Low-ranking ones have a whole set of additional problems that need their own answer. If your journal is so high-profile that promotion is unnecessary, then:

• You need people who can provide XML files to Clarivate when they ask for it (Clarivate is the company that manages the Science Citation Index and calculates the impact factor of your journal).
• You need people who can deal with the law. E.g. journals will usually qualify as newspapers, for which you need a legal permit.
• You also need to acquire DOIs for all your papers ...
• And you need to actively maintain your website with new featured articles and such ...
• And if you publish things other than research papers (e.g. Nature publishes editorials, book reviews, comments, and more) then you need to figure those out.

This is in addition to the (lots) of academic staff you probably need to handle the large number of submissions you receive. See e.g. how many full-time editors Physical Review Letters has, and the fact that Nature receives ~200 submissions per week, about 60% of which is rejected without review.

Can the journal hire lots of employees and do all this anyway? Sure, but if they take on this many staff members they'll have a different set of problems to worry about, such as providing HR. Can the journal hire some HR executives then? Sure they can, but at that point why call them a journal? They are effectively a publisher who call themselves a journal because it sounds better to academics.

Answer 9

Scientific journals and also some other parts of the academic infrastructure like universities, will be replaced by online resources. The reason why journals don't start to move in that direction all that much, is because it brings them closer to their eventual doom. The change to the new 21st century system will have to be implemented by the authors, they have to stop submitting to traditional journals, online resources replacing traditional journals will have to be set up. The reason why this isn't happening is because of tradition. We're all indoctrinated to use the resources we grew up using, and change requires considerable effort even if sticking to the old system is inefficient.

A good example is the arXiv preprint server. This server was not set up by Elsevier, the American Physical Society, or some other major publisher. It was mostly due to Paul Ginsparg's efforts. We may see the peer reviewed analogue of this appearing in the near future for specific subjects. But like arXiv, this will then not be considered to be just another online open access journal, it will be more like an entire field of science becoming an open access science.