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Why learned society journals stick to paywalls?

  Just returned from an excellent conference of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) in Barcelona. There was a lot of excellent science there, but I also learnt why many of my colleagues are sceptical about making society-owned journals fully open access. The key is that the main income of ESEB (an probably also other societies) is from its Journal of Evolutionary Biology, which is a pay-walled subscription journal. So majority society members seem to be OK with the current model because library subscription deals bring money to ESEB, allowing it to run many nice programmes and reduce membership fees. But this model means, as I mentioned in my previous blog, that we grossly overpay (with taxpayers money) for publishing our results, and only some publishers bring only a part of their income back to learned societies. Most of what libraries pay goes to publishers, who use it to compete with other publishers and to secure fat profits for themselves. This 85% could be ...
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A simple recipe for a truly open, prestigious, society-owned journal

Is there anything wrong with the current model of scientific publishing, and, if so, can we, practising researchers, do anything about it? I argue that the answer to both questions is yes. The publication costs charged by scientific journals are often frustratingly high, and the growing flood of articles published each week makes it increasingly difficult to maintain high peer review standards, putting the credibility of science in threat. But I also argue that we have the power to change this, it is just a matter of taking a couple of rather simple steps. And I think it’s our responsibility to take them.   So, let us start with a more detailed diagnosis of what is wrong. It can be summarised in two interrelated points.   1)       The current publication environment dominated by for-profit publishers makes science exclusive in two ways. Firstly, journal subscriptions have become an increasing strain on libraries budgets and have always been hard to...
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