I was cc-ed on a message sent by 18 members of the board of the journal Statistics and Computing, quitting their posts because the publisher (Springer) has announced a new policy whereby all authors will have to pay publication charges. The soon-to-be-former associate editors write, “Statistics and Computing will no longer publish the best science, both due to financial exclusion of those researchers who cannot afford to pay, and those community-minded researchers who refuse to pay on principle.”
I’ll put the full message, with its 18 signatories, below the fold.
My reaction to all this is that it would be great if the journal could move to an open and free system such as is done by the Journal of Machine Learning Research–a journal that I believe was founded by people who had resigned from the editorial board of a commercial journal.
Even commercial journals that begin with good intentions can develop fatal problems. For example, check out the sad story of the Berkeley Electronic Press, a set of commercial journals that was founded by a friend of mine. My friend’s an economist, and I guess he might say that it was the iron logic of capitalism that reduced a once-noble endeavor to a rent-seeking enterprise.
So, yeah, I’d recommend that Statistics and Computing follow the path of JMLR, really try to imitate its structure as closely as possible. Bayesian Analysis is another free journal that appears to run with minimal overhead.
It kind of bugs me, though. Profit-making companies have done great things in publishing and communication. A quick glance at our shelves reveals lots of wonderful books, almost all of which were published privately. As were Bayesian Data Analysis, Regression and Other Stories, Active Statistics, and the rest of my books. Lots of great movies are made for money too.
On the other hand, Arxiv is nonprofit, as is lots of the web, on which I post all my published and unpublished papers. Wikipedia is nonprofit, and this blog is written using WordPress, which appears to be another nonprofit organization. I teach at Columbia University, which is private but nonprofit, not run perfectly by any means but still going strong.
Scholarly publishing is a funny industry because it’s my vague impression that it started out as a low-budget noncommercial enterprise, and then some private rent-seekers moved in. I guess these companies were doing something special or they wouldn’t have been so successful at taking over, but now it seems to have gone too far. More sites like Arxiv, JMLR, and Bayesian Analysis would be a good thing. Right now we’re always having to figure out where to publish our papers; it’s just an absolute mess. These journal submission websites make the Department of Motor Vehicles office look like a lean machine by comparison.
P.S. Retraction Watch ran a story on this, where they quoted Robin Ryder as saying, “If the editors regroup elsewhere to form a new journal, they hope to publish with a society, Ryder told us, citing journals like Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Annals of Statistics, ‘none of which force authors to pay APCs.'”
I think it would be a mistake for them to follow the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Annals of Statistics. Both these journals have arduous paperwork-laden submission processes and both charge for access.
If you’re going to start over, why not follow the model of JMLR and Bayesian Analysis and make it all free? Cut out the middleman entirely!
P.P.S. Here’s the full text of the letter from the 14 members of the editorial board:
We are writing to resign as Associate Editors of Statistics and Computing effective 31 December 2026, due to Springer Nature’s recent decision to impose Article Processing Charges (APCs) upon all authors.
We have the greatest admiration for your hard work for this journal and for the scientific community: under your stewardship, and that of previous Editors, the journal has published many articles of extremely high quality and it is a leading journal in our field. It has been an honour to play a small part in this during our time as Associate Editors, and we resign with great regret.
We understand that the decision to introduce APCs was not your own but was imposed by corporate management, and we are sorry that our resignation will put you in a difficult position. Nonetheless, the APCs that Springer Nature will introduce on 1st January 2027 are irreconcilable with our vision of science. They are not compatible with the goal of publishing the best science, whoever the authors; they exclude vast swathes of the scientific community; they are not a responsible use of the taxpayers’ money that funds our research; they are also at odds with the standards in Statistics.
Our decision to resign due to this change should not be taken as support for the existing system. The current academic publishing system is built upon vast quantities of unpaid labour and establishes a financial paywall to view the final research articles. Funding bodies are quite rightly pushing back against this, requiring that publicly funded research be freely accessible. From this perspective the move to “open-access” at Statistics and Computing might seem to have some merit on the surface. However, achieving this through APCs simply moves the financial barrier to a different part of the system. The exploitation still remains, and now Statistics and Computing will no longer publish the best science, both due to financial exclusion of those researchers who cannot afford to pay, and those community-minded researchers who refuse to pay on principle.
We would be very supportive of creating a new, genuinely open journal instead, possibly under the auspices of a learned society. We would welcome the opportunity to work with other members of the editorial board to create such a journal, and would be glad to submit future work there. We hope to have conversations with the editorial board and the community about such a move.
We hope to remain in contact with you. Thank you for your confidence,
Pierre Alquier (ESSEC)
Julyan Arbel (Inria Grenoble)
Louis Aslett (Durham University)
Joshua Bon (Adelaide University)
Alice Cleynen (CNRS)
Adrien Corenflos (University of Warwick)
Francesca Romana Crucinio (University of Turin)
Kamélia Daudel (ESSEC)
Ritabrata Dutta (University of Warwick)
Mathieu Gerber (University of Bristol)
Sahani Pathiraja (University of New South Wales)
François Portier (CREST-ENSAI)
Sam Power (University of Bristol)
Robin Ryder (Imperial College London)
Leah South (Queensland University of Technology)
Scott Sisson (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
David Warne (Queensland University of Technology)
Olivier Zahm (Inria Grenoble)
My vague impression is that Robert Maxwell, the closest thing to a Bond Movie villain I’ve ever interacted with, was the business genius who first realized he could get rich off scientific journals.
It seems very strange to me that Ghislaine Maxwell being the daughter of Robert Maxwell is rarely mentioned.
In 1969 there was a very nasty takeover fight between Robert Maxwell and the US financier
Saul Steinberg for control of Pergamon Press. A quote (I don’t remember who from)
“These scientists, they don’t know what money means.”
Two quotes from the letter:
“The current academic publishing system is built upon vast quantities of unpaid labour and establishes a financial paywall to view the final research articles.”
“We would be very supportive of creating a new, genuinely open journal instead, possibly under the auspices of a learned society.”
I hope it’s okay to (once again) refer to some thoughts and ideas concerning publishing and peer review, should this be helpful concerning any pondering by the resigned editors about options and ideas for the possible new journal:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/03/you-can-cite-peer-reviewed-research-in-support-of-almost-any-claim-no-matter-how-absurd/#comment-2401742
I’m a grad student asking this honestly: what do we pay the journals _for_? It’s not server costs, because articles are kilobytes and large supplemental files go on separate repositories. It’s not peer-review because that’s free labor. It’s not printing costs. It’s obviously not cutting-edge proofing and publishing interfaces. My free market brain says that the fat cats shouldn’t be able to survive; is legacy and prestige just so valuable? I know this is probably a beaten dead horse for seasoned academics, but it’s truly confusing from this end of experience.
Entomophagist,
I don’t know. I guess it’s the coordination cost involved in setting up the reputation. JMLR and Bayesian Analysis succeeded here, but various other entrants have not. An example of a failure is the aforementioned Berkeley Electronic Press, which seemed to have a lot going for it.
I don’t have a sense of how hard it would be for the former editorial board of Statistics and Computing to follow the JMLR route. Maybe they can do it!
I think that one issue is that, to start a new journal if the goal isn’t to make money, you need some people to put in the energy to put it together. And the people with the energy aren’t always so interested in setting up a journal. For example, I’d rather write books, articles, and blog entries. Bob Carpenter would rather write software and documentation. Etc. You need to have the right people in the right place at the right time. In contrast, any asshole can set up a spammy predatory journal and maybe make some money–so lots of people do!
I’m a grad student asking this honestly: what do we pay the journals _for_?
The imprimatur? You have passed some kind of approval process?
Other than that, probably not much of real value. Some valuable co-ordination efforts such as any good secretariat should provide. Dispatching and receiving articles to and from (unpaid) editors, reviewers and authors. In some cases, possibly legal screening and advice.
However, I am old enough that I once owned the first edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
This was back when one would submit a typewritten paper copy of your paper to be published. Then you got real value from the publisher. The publisher actually typeset your work and turned it into a polished presentation.
So something like “sigma = 20” turned into “σ = 20”, or your table that looked like crap became a thing of beauty. You could even have subscripts! And superscripts!!
Today, with something like LaTeX I can turn out a paper that is virtually indistinguishable from an APA journal article with little more than a mouse click. Forty years ago I would have needed a basic knowledge of typesetting[1] and access to a sophisticated print shop.
Publishers—perhaps more accurately print services—provided real value. They still provide value as a secretariat but a key value has gone.
1. The APA Manual included coding instructions on how to indicate to the typesetter that you needed a Greek letter, a square root, etc.
I despise the current state of academic publishing, but there are things about this protest letter I find strange.
1 “We would be very supportive of creating a new, genuinely open journal instead, possibly under the auspices of a learned society.” Do they mean *open*, or do they mean *free* (as in without costs for publishing)? All the society journals I know of charge publication fees, though they’re not as rapacious as the commercial journals.
2 “community-minded researchers who refuse to pay on principle” — ?? This was an option? I charged my grants tens of thousands of dollars to pay page charges when I could have refused “on principle”? I find this hard to believe, and, if true, I suspect this is more like fraud than “community-mindedness,” unless the authors making this refusal make a public statement of it.
3 All of these issues existed 10 years ago (or more). Given that, and what anyone paying attention should know, I would hope that the letter writers would propose something less vague and more substantial for what to create in the future. I know that’s not easy, but they could have just ended their letter with a justified resignation.
Finally, I disagree with Andrew’s framing of for- vs. non-profit. As I’m sure Andrew knows, non-profit doesn’t mean “not making a profit,” but rather just directing the profit internally. Universities are an excellent example of this, with eye-watering tuition costs, > $million salaries for administrators, and behavior that is indistinguishable from for-profit corporation.
I also think it is strange to talk about authors who cannot afford or refuse to pay. Charging fees will deter authors simply because they would rather spend their money in some other way. If the editors want the best papers, then they will object to anything that deters authors.
I am not sure about the “refuse” but if you are a researcher in, let’s say, Bangladesh or Mali, a US$3,000 publication fee might wipe out your entire project budget. You could probably support an RA or technician for a year for that money.
Or, say I’m retired but I might want to publish a paper that I’ve been working as a hobby. That fee may be a significant part of my pension. We get something along the lines of “I can visit my grandchildren or I can pay to publish”.
That falls under “researchers who cannot afford to pay”, which is fine, not “refuse to pay.”
Many journals have reduced or waived fees for low income countries. To use your example, an author from Mali doesn’t have to pay publishing fees to publish their paper open access in Taylor and Francis journals.
That increases the cost a little for those that don’t qualify for waivers.
In the old days we occasionally published papers from work unsupported by grants and were able to publish without article processing fees in American Chemical Soc journals and also J Biol Chem. Not sure if that would still work
You might think so (charging fees deterring authors) but many scientists are quite excited about the prospect of paying nearly $13000 to have a paper published open access in Nature (for example). You could publish using the non-open-access route (paper only accessible through subscription or pay per-view) but many funders require that work they fund is published open access so you have to find the fee (I.e. the funder does!)
There are plenty of decent journals with publishing fees in the $2000ish range and it’s largely prestige and career considerations that send papers to the high charging journals. Still all the high charging journals have plenty of willing customers (Nature reject more than 90% of submissions)
There’s that old quote, “Universities are hedge funds with classrooms attached.”
Non-profits are a bit more complex than “directing the profit internally.” The controlling parties of a non-profit–the members of the board of directors–do not represent residual claimants and are not a residual claimant themselves. I agree that a non-profit has to make a profit (or break even), but the profit is only directed internally to the extent that the board gets hijacked by management.
Non-profit tertiary education in the US has a lot of management problems: high agency costs. But they are still in the education business, as opposed to for-profit tertiary education, which is largely about hoovering up the most student loan proceeds at minimum cost. “Bad” is much better than “worse.” Similarly, if you’re sick, stay away from a for-profit hospital or nursing home if you can. The for-profit hospitals are not as bad as the for-profit educators, but that’s mostly because they are watched like a hawk by insurers and regulators.
I would agreed with you, until the recent Musk v OpenAI trial. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, but the controlling parties have become billionaires from it.
@Raghu Parsarathy
Regarding your second point, I think this refers to people like our host, Andrew Gelman. As I understand it, his approach to publishing his findings is: ‘Give me suitable conditions or I will publish this elsewhere.’ ‘Somewhere else’ may refer to places like arXiv, Pubmed, or simply a PDF on his website.
This is, of course, not an option for people who need to publish in a ‘good’ journal in order to climb the hazardous career ladder of a scientist. I also do not believe that many people share this attitude, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. My point is simply that such people exist.
Here are the last 20 or so journals in which Andrew has published (and this isn’t even back to the start of 2024).
* Population Health Metrics
* JCGS
* JRSS A
* JRSS A
* Statistical Method in Medical Research
* Bayesian Analysis
* British Medical Journal
* Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualization
* Theory and Society
* Advances in Methods and Practices in (c’mon, get to the point here)
* Nature
* Harvard Data Science Review
* Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education
* CHANCE
* American Statistician
* PLOS Comp Biology
* Statistics in Medicine
* Statistical Science
It even contains names like “Nature” and “Harvard”, which might surprise those that have read Andrew’s writings about those two companies (yes, a 501(c)(3) non-profit like Harvard still counts as a “company”).
There are only three of these that look to be free and open access: Bayesian Analysis, Harvard Data Science Review, and Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualization. I hadn’t heard of that last one, but I like free and open access! I’m planning on submitting soon to Computo (French stats society journal), which is not only free open access, but they take executable notebooks, just like StanCon.
I stopped at the Statistical Science paper, “Past, present and future of software for Bayesian inference.” I was invited to be the lead author on that one and passed because of the pay-to-publish nature of the journal. It also sounded like a thankless job. In the end, Eric Štrumbelj did a way better job than I would have.
Bob:
Yes, I’m always trying to find places to publish my research. Unfortunately, very few journals are free and open access. I post new papers on my website, and that’s free to all, and I also usually remember to post things on Arxiv, which is also free. Journals, though, that’s much tougher, especially given my goal of reaching varied audiences.
Yes, I think “refuse to pay” means submit elsewhere. This is a boycott of that journal, although a true boycott can extend to refusing to referee or give quick opinions. (This is what I do with expensive journals. It can help associate editors persuade the journal to reduce prices.)
A decent number of society journals publish without fees in my field, though often with an embargo period before new articles become openly accessible (which I guess allows the commercial publisher to make money from subscription fees).
I recently made a blog post asking where I should publish and I made a list of almost 100 fully open access journals in my field and closely related ones. There are ~20 which are diamond open access but they tend to be fairly small with either a low impact factor or, if not indexed in Web of Science, no impact factor at all. That means that many institutions don’t count publications there when evaluating researchers. Due to that, the journals get ignored even though they are doing the better thing for science. Luckily one of those venues, Open Research Europe, is backed by the European Commission, so we might see a push to truly open science publishing in Europe. There are also Q2 diamond open access journals funded by both the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Science of South Africa.
https://evidenceandreason.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/where-should-i-publish-my-research/
Does everyone know the story of the Machine Learning (Kluwer) editors quitting and starting the free and open-access Journal of Machine Learning Research? If not, here’s the letter from Michael Jordan on behalf of the resigning editors of ML. They had a plan and it worked in that their free and open access journal is now the marquee journal in the field (not that people take journals seriously in ML compared to conference proceedings—I’m regularly told it’s more prestigious to publish in NeurIPS than JMLR).
I think this is a step in the right direction. I wouldn’t have been OK being an editor for a for-profit journal charging subscription prices and paywalling articles. I would prefer everyone joined me in boycotting reviewing for journals that are not free and open access. I just wish my co-authors didn’t often insist on submitting to such journals. I’ve drawn the line at paying publication fees out of my group’s budget.
@Entomophagist: People pay the journals for the prestige of publishing in a place like PNAS. When hiring committees want to see articles in Nature, Science, or PNAS, a poor biology researcher doesn’t have much choice. That’s why Andrew mocks it as “PPNAS”, the “prestigious proceedings …” The astrophysicists don’t seem to have this problem—they have very low hurdles on publication and don’t seem to attach a lot of prestige to any of their journals (please correct me if this is a misapprehension from talking to a few biased astrophysicists).
@Raghu: CL and TACL are run by the Association for Computational Linguistics and they’re free open source. JMLR and TMLR are also free and open access. As is Bayesian Analysis, as Andrew points out.
@Andrew: Aren’t all non-profit companies “private” companies? Simons Foundation, of which Flatiron Institute is a division, is also a 501(c)(3) non-profit, just like a university. Isn’t the only other alternative a governmental operation of some kind? Also, you said, “Bob Carpenter would rather write software and documentation.” I’d be happy to help solve the cost of publication issue if I knew how to help on the software or organization side. I don’t want to be a journal editor, though! Too much nagging people who are working as volunteers, which I find uncomfortable, frustrating, and time consuming.
Regular plug for the Science Post.
Subjects: physics, astronomy, chemistry and the recently added political science.
Free, open-source. No publication fees. Run by volunteers who want to fix science publishing. Referee reports are public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciPost
The argument that “plenty of good journals, e.g., Nature, charge publication fees” or “I’ve pais thousands of dollars in publication fees in the past” is missing the point. Things that make a journal good/prestigious depend primarily on (a) name recognition of the editorial board, (b) name recognition of the authors who publish in the said journal and (c) strength of the papers published, which usually takes some time (possibly years) to judge. What is being debated here, specifically, is “what is the value that publishers provide,” especially in the age of primarily electronic dissemination. That Nature has been captured by the same pay-to-play publisher does not mean the publisher per se is providing any substantial value.
I don’t think anyone is making an argument in their “plenty of good journals…” or …I’ve paid thousands of dollars…” comments about the topic of the thread. These comments were made in relation to questions/comments from others.
The “what is the value that publishers provide…” question is an old chestnut. Since you referred to Nature they would most likely say that they use dedicated in-house editorial teams rather than volunteer academic editors and have high costs associated with assessing/rejecting nine submitted manuscripts for every one they accept. No doubt they charge what they consider the “market” can bear which no doubt involves some profiteering. Ultimately they rely on the kudos associated with Nature papers and as their rejection rate shows they have plenty of customers; so they provide prestige as a notional element of their charges.
The same applies pretty much down the scale of prestige. One could get some idea about the “true” cost of running and publishing papers in journals with strong editorial and peer review oversight by looking at eLife which aimed about 15 years ago to shake up the publishing models. eLife started out as a free to publish and read journal since costs were entirely subsidised. Since the subsidisers eventually pulled out eLife now charges $3000 (I think). That seems a pretty standard amount unless one is aiming for a prestige journal. And like many journals you don’t have to pay it if you can’t afford to. Anyway, you can go to the eLife website, read the breakdown of their operational and processing costs and decide whether you think that’s reasonable or not.
A truer cost of processing, publishing and hosting a research article is the F1000 or Welcome Trust journals. For a research article these are around $1800 per article. These are “in-house” non-profit publishers as is eLife, but the latter does a bunch of editorial oversight and manuscript selection which increases costs. F1000 and Wellcome publishing are article hosters and since, for example, Wellcome Trust opens it’s journal to all Wellcome-funded science it has already done its “selection” at the funding stage.
That’s biomed science but since biomed is by far the largest expenditure in US science funding (apart from “defence” spending of course), it’s appropriate to consider journal funding in that context. There is no question that prestige plays a large role in scientific publishing and publishers can exploit that. We shouldn’t be surprised that scientists, funders and scientific institutions value prestige – it’s a fundamental human characteristic. There are also practical reasons for wishing to publish in a high prestige journal.
I am surprised at the number of comments as to how publishing houses got to be so powerful. People seem to forget in the grand scheme of things pdfs, markdown files, blogs, arxiv, internet access, etc etc are relatively new. For quote a long time actual paper copies printed by publishing companies were the only way to disseminate results. Probably for the first half of my career this was the case. I still have paper reprints of a number of my early papers.
I think what we are seeing now is an old industry trying to hang on in the face of new technology, and the imprimatur may well be what you are paying for.
“…many funders require that work they fund is published open access so you have to find the fee.”
Indeed. Sorry for being tangential here, but I think it is worth pointing out that the NIH, one of the funders with such a requirement, is currently in the process of making new rules. One of the proposed changes will prohibit the payment of publication fees from grant funds. But they are not changing the requirement for open access publication.
Yes thanks, it will be interesting to see what they come up with. Someone has to pay and if they were to go down the Wellcome Trust Open route of hosting a journal (or several perhaps for NIH) for researchers that they fund, publishing costs of NIH funding research could come way down. I haven’t heard that raised as a possibility.
One of the ideas I believe is to limit publishing costs from a grant to a small percentage (1% ?) of grant award, so that for a $1 million 5 year grant, $10,000 could be spent on publishing and anything above that would have to be found elsewhere. That would fund maybe 3 papers in decent but moderate-prestige journals. It’s quite possible that for a stellar couple of papers that the reearcher might wish to publish in high prestige journals that the University would be comfortable paying a chunk of the costs since the prestige reflects on them too!