The boycott on Elsevier (which we talked about here and here) is going strong, now with 4072 signatures, and has received ample media coverage, including The Economist and the Guardian (Kai von Fintel has a useful list of links). Now, it turns out that overpricing its journals is not Elsevier's only sin: the distinguished mathematician Douglas Arnold provides compelling additional reasons to be discontent with Elsevier's behavior (H/T John Baez):
[...] there is another reason for researchers to disassociate from Elsevier, which I find even more compelling: their many lapses in ethical and quality publishing practices.
He goes on to list cases of journals where the practice of refereeing is 'spotty', to say the least (e.g. a journal where 58 papers by the Editor-in-Chief were published in a single year); cases of so-called 'medical journals' which turned out to be sponsored by a given pharmaceutical company (you can guess for yourself what the contents of such journals amounted to...); and many more atrocities.
Again, Elsevier does not have a very prominent position in philosophy publishing, so we may think that this is none of our (direct) business. But academic publishing in general is very much 'our business', and one hope I have is that, while this boycott is directed specifically at Elsevier, it will be able to set in motion significant changes in academic publishing in general. At the very least, it should get us all to think about it very carefully.
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