Academic publishing is lazy and unethical

Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the 40-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine – regarded as the leading publication for brain-imaging research in the world. The board, whose members include very senior figures in the world of brain science, is protesting what it sees as the publisher Elsevier’s greedy and unethical behaviour.  

They were reacting to the company’s refusal to reduce the journal’s ‘publication fees’ – that is, the fees scientists must pay to publish their findings on an open-access, free-to-read basis. At issue isn’t, quite, the existence of such fees – if you’re giving articles away for free, someone obviously has to pay. But these fees run into thousands of pounds a pop, and bear no decipherable relation to the cost of formatting an article and whacking it up online. And NeuroImage is not, in this respect, any sort of an outlier in the academic world.