data jungle adventures

The Associate Editors of the Journal of Biogeography are worried about some big changes happening in academic publishing. Companies like John Wiley & Sons Ltd (Wiley) are moving towards “Open Access” (OA), which means research is free to read online. Sounds good, right? But here’s the catch: many journals now charge authors a lot of money to publish their work.

This puts a heavy financial burden on young scientists and those from lower-income countries, making it harder for them to share their research. The fees for Open Access can go up to a staggering 11,000 USD! Even the Journal of Biogeography charges 4,800 USD per article. This new approach also focuses more on quantity than quality, which could lower research standards.

Of course, publishing good scientific journals costs money, and the editors support a fair way for publishers to recover their costs, like charging authors or institutions. They also like the idea of making scientific content freely available through Open Access. But they believe there’s a better way to do this, one that doesn’t burden authors with high costs and fairly compensates scientists for their work.

The Journal of Biogeography took a work stoppage to show how serious they are. They want to communicate their concerns to their colleagues and the profit-driven journals and encourage more discussion on the topic. They are open to finding a compromise with the publisher of JBI, but they are also prepared to step down from their positions if the publisher goes full Open Access without considering fairness for certain researchers.

It’s been noticed that some progress has been made, but it’s not enough compared to the huge profits that many publishers are making. The editors usually work without financial rewards, all to advance the field of biogeography and support high-quality research. On the other hand, Wiley, the owner of the Journal of Biogeography, has been making huge profits, and that doesn’t sit well with the editors.

They believe the Journal of Biogeography has a proud history as a thought leader in their field, and they’re against a business model that prioritizes publisher profits over the well-being of authors and the scientific quality of journals.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jbi.14697