RE: May issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Well, to make the point REALLY obvious, publishers do have the 
right, indeed duty, to exclude anything that is found to be 
libelous, infringe copyright, invade privacy, plagiarize, etc. 
Such material can cause obvious damage resulting from law suits. 
But I would go further and say, as I did before, that publishers 
can exercise their right to fire editors when they believe they 
are not performing their jobs adequately if, for instance, they 
start accepting articles that fall outside the scope of the 
journal as the publisher sees it--e.g., articles espousing 
intelligent design in a journal on evolution.

The editors do not own the journals, after all; they are merely 
hired to perform a service, and if they do not perform well, like 
all employees they are subject to dismissal. What constitutes 
good performance is up to the publisher. As journal editors, they 
do not enjoy the protections of tenure as they do in their jobs 
as professors. They can indeed be fired at will.

Sandy Thatcher


At 6:20 PM -0400 5/19/10, Heather Morrison wrote:
>Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>I should think that it falls within the scope of a publisher's
>business decision making to exclude certain categories of
>articles if they believe that including them in their journals
>will do economic damage to them. The editors, of course, may
>object, and they are always free to disassociate themselves from
>any journal whose publisher takes this stance.
>
>Heather's Comment:
>
>Excluding articles on the basis that they will do economic damage
>to the journal is a recipe for disaster for academic freedom.
>If this is what Sandy indeed meant, then every Editor, Reader,
>Reviewer, and Librarian should immediately dissociate themselves
>with each and every one of such journals.  But perhaps Sandy's
>meaning is not exactly as stated here?
>
>Heather Morrison, MLIS
>The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com