math journal wars

["Ann Okerson" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

NOTE:  The editor's behavior seems a little tacky... or what am I 
missing here?  Ann

>From CHE, 8/23/07:

Editor's Calculation in Starting New Math Journal Divides His 
Editorial Board

After holding onto accepted manuscripts for more than a year, the 
managing editor of a mathematics journal has announced he will 
begin a competitor, according to the new issue of Nature.

The editor, Anthony Bak, a mathematician at the University of 
Bielefeld, in Germany, was fired in January, having not published 
any issues of the monthly journal K-Theory since April 2006. Mr. 
Bak told Nature that he had left the journal because its 
subscription costs were too high and because of production 
problems at Springer, the journal's publisher.

The journal's Board of Editors resigned en masse with Mr. Bak, 
echoing a move by the editors of another math journal, Topology, 
who quit to protest its pricing policies and later announced 
plans to create a cheaper rival. Springer did not learn of the 
board resignations until May.

This month Mr. Bak announced that he would launch the Journal of 
K-Theory, to be published by Cambridge University Press, at a 
cheaper subscription rate.

But several of the editors who resigned with Mr. Bak declined to 
follow him to the new journal because of his withholding of the 
manuscripts, and two have even returned to the Springer journal. 
However, they told Nature that the discipline was too small to 
support two journals, and so they would publish in K-Theory only 
the papers that had already been accepted.

Lila Guterman