Dear Bram, Hilary, all,

surely these are important matters and I'm sympathetic to what you write. I would like to raise a few points, not to discourage action but to try and make the bigger picture clearer.

1) This is not about Elsevier solely. All the big western (well, UK, Dutch, German - that's it) publishers share the profile you describe: Taylor and Francis (incl. Routledge), Sage, Wiley-Blackwell, SpringerNature. If you take on one or move away from one, there is no reason why you should not act the same way in the other cases.

2) It is important to look at our goals. Is it just lower subscription prices? Lower profits for those companies? Would you not take action if Elsevier's profits had been between 0-5% over the last decades? The question arises what kind of scholarly communication system you envision. What is acceptable and what not? For me and many other people that have studied scholarly communication what we should strive for might best be termed a scholarly commons. What that could entail is described in this paper we recently shared: The Scholarly Commons - principles and practices to guide research communication. More and more organisations engaged in scholarly communication look at this commons models to guide their choices and shape their governance.

3) I would applaud it if the full editorial board of Geoforum would move away and start a journal elsewhere. It has been done before and there is help available for that transition. But however strong a signal that will be for Elsevier and other publishers, it is a minor thing in the grand scheme. Probably Elsevier will start or buy more new journals in the same week that you decide to leave.

4) To make a broader and more lasting impact there is one essential thing that needs to be done and that is moving away from impact factor thinking. Signing DORA costs 2 minutes but is crucially important. Forcing all institutions, funders, societies to sign DORA (if they have not done so yet) is the next step. Then when you and all stakeholders have signed DORA you gotta stick to it: refuse to evaluate research or researchers based on journal titles or impact factors, choose publication venues purely on reasonable APC and technical standards. Don't derive your status from being on the board of a certain journal. 

5) A second thing anybody can do from now on, with huge impact, is to immediately share your paper as a preprint as soon as it is finished. If it is social science upload it to SocArXiv, if it is physical upload it to EarthArXiv. Both preprint archives follow the model set by ArXiv, used for over a quarter of a century now by most physicists, mathematicians and astronomers to share papers, generate feedback and speed up publication. Uploading your next manuscript takes 30 minutes and does not preclude submitting and publishing in journals. But what it does (also) do is show that the value added of traditional publishers is only in organizing peer review. Once we showed that and once we moved away from useless IF-rankings it will become much easier to negotiate far better deals.

For now I will leave it with that and not elaborate on open science practices for geography. 

So in summary: every researcher can help create a system with less pressures, lower costs and higher value now with 2 simple steps: DORA, preprints, DORA, preprints, DORA, preprints ..... (and no, don't choose SSRN preprints, because that is Elsevier again)

Kind regards,

Jeroen Bosman
Utrecht University Library
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hillary Shaw [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2017 7:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Editorial on German Projekt deal and need to divest from the corporate publishing model

Following on this theme, there's an interesting situation re barristers, barristers' clerks, and solicitors. Oncer upon a time the barrister was the senior of these three (I know, had a relative who'd worked his way up through recorder, circuit judge etc  to senior judge). Barristers' clerks would have been the junior facilitators; here's what they are employed to do.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barristers%27_clerk

However - I also have a friend who is a barrister in a northern UK Chambers. From his (admittedly anecdotal) comments, the hierarchy has inverted somewhat. Barristers' clerks hold the whip hand in that they dictate who has what office space, which barristers get the 'good' contracts, who gets sent where. Cross the barristers' clerks up the wrong way and you will, from the north of England, keep getting handed cases down in Exeter. You may also get lumbered with the solicitors who are slow at paying - and here's another inversion, the barristers cannot afford to alienate the solicitors, so they must sometimes forego payment or accept very slow payment, as he who kicks up a fuss gets least work from these solicitors, or the worst/hardest/most tedious cases.

There must be a term for this professional 'inversion', and I wonder what other professions it might apply to ???

Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8QE
www.fooddeserts.org



-----Original Message-----
From: Buscher, Bram <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wed, Dec 13, 2017 5:08 pm
Subject: Editorial on German Projekt deal and need to divest from the corporate publishing model

Dear all,

Joel Wainwright and I recently wrote and published a 2-page Geoforum editorial about the need to divest from Elsevier en the corporate publishing model that might be of interest to members on the list, building on and inspired by the German 'Projekt Deal': https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/

The commercial scientific publishing model is broken. The basic problem is simple. We scholars give the products of our labour our research papers, reviews, and so forth - for free to for-profit corporations. These corporations then sell the same products of our labour back to us, via libraries. This arrangement might be acceptable if the publishing industry charged only modest fees or contributed some fundamental quality to the work. But they do neither. No matter how much they say they care about knowledge, their main priority is - as with any for-profit corporation - maximizing returns for private investors. In pursuing this goal, they employ creative means to extract resources from the public purse to pay for exorbitant journal fees - funds that otherwise could be invested in public research and education. In the process, the publishing corporations intensify a perverse focus on impact factors, citation counts, 'clickbait' articles and academic branding, rather than genuine engagement. All this degrades the quality of academic work and serves to undermine the conditions in which many of us work.

The whole text: https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/
--------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Bram Büscher

Professor and chair, sociology of development and change, Wageningen University
Visiting Professor, Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies - University of Johannesburg
Research Associate, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University

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Senior editor Conservation & Society: please consider submitting a paper! See: http://www.conservationandsociety.org/<http://www.conservationandsociety.org./>
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