creating a web site and forum for Elsevier journals Editors and Board members

dear Elsevier Editors and boards

  after I submitted to the Harvard blog imechanica.org

"My letter of resignation from the board of International Journal of Solids and Structures"
Submitted by Mike Ciavarella on Tue, 2008-05-20 14:55.  www.micheleciavarella.it

which received so far 1812 reads in only 2 days, I have received many letters that jammed
my E-mail system.  To continue my normal operation, since this is not expected as a
full-time occupation, I therefore decided to create, according to many people's suggestion,
the site:-

   www.elseviereditors.org

which is nearly ready to work, and that will contain initially only collects a few documents, and later could be a forum to discuss e.g. the following topics (if you have little time read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier).

If Elsevier does not bend drastically to our conditions, I am exploring new avenues in open access: if Elsevier Editors or members of the boards are interested, they can contact me about discussing with:

A) http://www.plos.org/   is a hugely growing nonprofit organization of scientists and
physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely
available public resource.

B) Math Sci. Publ is non-profit and run by several Mathematics faculty member at UC Berkeley.  
http://www.mathscipub.org/

Regards,
Mike

Prof. Michele Ciavarella.
LMS, CNRS UMR 7649 Ecole Polytechnique 91128 Palaiseau cedex France ph: +33 1 69 33 57 12
Fax : +33 1 69 33 57 06 (travail) Mob. +33 6 59 59 9690
www.micheleciavarella.it

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness
Open Source Publishing
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Charles Steele on journal pricing/Elsevier and related topic. : Background of JoMMS
Submitted by Charles R. Steele on Fri, 2007-06-22 20:52.
node/1531#comment-3251
    
Blog 19Jun07

I served as editor of IJSS for 20 years, with my associate editor Marie-Louise Steele. When Elsevier put high pressure on us to convert to a new web-based editorial system, after we had had considerable frustration for several years with their previous system, I began browsing on the web on the topic of journals. The result was shame for having served Elsevier so long. A few years before that, a colleague in EE urged the library to drop all Elsevier journals, and I countered with a defense that in the mechanics area, those with high impact factors were Elsevier.  Some members of the board complained that IJSS was a "cash cow" for Elsevier, but my enlightenment came with the articles on the topic by Ted Bergstrom, accessible on his web page:

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

He points out the business model for commercial journal publication. Namely, the suppliers (i.e. authors and reviewers) furnish all the raw materials and subassemblies free of charge. The publisher furnishes the final assembly, and then sells the product back to the suppliers at ten times cost. A beautiful system!

Actual costs of some mechanics journals, from the site created by Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee: http://www.journalprices.com/

ARCHIVE OF APPLIED MECHANICS, Price per article: 38.06,
Price per citation: 71.01, Relative Cost Index 11.11

COMPUTER METHODS IN APPLIED MECHANICS AND ENGINEERING, Price per article: 36.19
Price per citation: 24.56, Relative Cost Index 4.65

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MECHANICS A-SOLIDS, Price per article: 10.47,
Price per citation: 12.31, Relative Cost Index 2.42

INTERNATIONAL APPLIED MECHANICS, Price per article: 29.09,
Price per citation: 21.46, Relative Cost Index 5.34

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOLIDS AND STRUCTURES, Price per article: 20.34
Price per citation: 14.49, Relative Cost Index 3.67

JOURNAL OF APPLIED MECHANICS, Price per article: 3.6,
Price per citation: 4.06, Relative Cost Index 0.81

JOURNAL OF MECHANICS OF MATERIALS AND STRUCTURES, Price per article: 2.5
Price per citation: ?, Relative Cost Index ? (Too new, in 2cd year)

JOURNAL OF THE MECHANICS AND PHYSICS OF SOLIDS, Price per article: 34.13
Price per citation: 12.49, Relative Cost Index 4

MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS OF SOLIDS, Price per article: 39.4
Price per citation: 72.92, Relative Cost Index 8.37

MECHANICS BASED DESIGN OF STRUCTURES AND MACHINES, Price per article: 72.83
Price per citation: 745.71, Relative Cost Index 49.83

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED FRACTURE MECHANICS, Price per article: 25.31
Price per citation: 32.4, Relative Cost Index 5.55

SMART MATERIALS & STRUCTURES, Price per article: 3.91
Price per citation: 3.94, Relative Cost Index 0.69

From the costs, can you pick out which are from commercial and which from "non profit" publishers? Actually the "non profits" make some money on publications, so you can see the excess profit of the commercial publishers. For example, IJSS had around 1000 subscribers in 1980. To make a wild guess, that has probably been reduced to, say, 500 subscribers today. At the list price of over  $7000/year, that means an income of $3.5m. The actual cost is probably less than $0.5m, leaving a $3m profit/year on just one of Elsevier's 2000 journals.   

Where do the profits go? Reed Elsevier has yearly profits of around $2b, roughly half coming from Elsevier, the publisher of the technical journals. Many have asked why the profits are not much higher. Apparently the workers for the commercial publishers are not particularly well-paid, but on the executive level that is not the case. In 2003, there was a plan to give the CEO of Reed Elsevier a package of $16m, and the CEO of Elsevier apparently receives a yearly package of $3m.

Since there was no indication that the commercial publishers were reversing the pressure for increased profits out of the limited institutional resources, 21 of the 23 members of the IJSS board of editors joined with us in resigning and establishing an alternative. The late George Herrmann, the founder of IJSS, also supported this and served as Senior Editorial Advisor. The result is JoMMS, published by the non profit organization Mathematical Sciences Publications. The details are on the web page jomms.org. With JoMMS there is no author charge, including for printed color graphics. However, as pointed out in the above Elsevier discussion, journals do cost. Instead of soaking a few subscribers, JoMMS has a low price of $500 per year for print and e-access (the cost of one color figure for most commercial and non profit publishers). So we plan to reverse the general trend and cover costs with a large base of subscribers. Those at a subscribing institution have the print copy plus exclusive e-access of an article for 12 months past publication. After that e-access is free to the world. Note that this agrees with the NIH policy for papers written on grants. There is a possibility that other funding agencies will be following suit. So the above Elsevier offer of free e-access after 24 months is not so generous, but it is a welcome change from the preceding charge of $70 for a download of a paper for someone at a nonsubscribing institution.

The improvement in speed to publication is also welcome. My suspicion is that this will be acompanied by a further decrease in the effort for final editing of manuscripts. For several years, IJSS papers were printed with the same submission  and acceptance dates, despite the full information we provided and our many complaints. A "great innovation" came about three years ago, when Elsevier decided that the first page of a paper could start on either the left or right side, to eliminate blank pages. I wonder how many meetings of the highly paid executives were required to arrive at this decision.

Since you are reading this, you probably spend a considerable portion of your time on publication matters. So take just a little time to read the articles by Bergstrom and on many library web pages. Then consider if you wish to donate freely your effort as author, reviewer, or editor to publishers who are exploiting you and your institution. The exploitation will quickly come to an end when tenure and funding committees start evaluating resumes by dividing journal impact factors by Bergstrom's Relative Cost Index.

Charles R. Steele