Albert CardonaMar 3

"Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals"
https://www.science.org/content/article/major-china-funder-plans-curtail-spending-pricey-open-access-fees

The journals? The cash-cows aka megajournals of the glamour journals, i.e., Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances.

#ScientificPublishing

Show threadMáté VargaMar 3
@albertcardona While superficially this seems to be a step into the right direction, I think we should not be delusional: CAS is doing this, in part to prop up its own set of journals, which, quite frankly, are not that different. I think an excellent example of this are “Innovation Press” journals (https://www.the-innovation.org/innovation-press/). Formally Cell Press, but not quite. Also its flagship journal “The Innovation” has an impact factor over 30 (!!!), yet I bet most people never heard of it.
INNOVATION PRESS

INNOVATION PRESS

Show threadMáté Varga
@albertcardona And these journals also charge a lot: APC for innovation is 5000 USD (https://www.the-innovation.org/authors). So for CAS this is not about money, this is not about principle, this is about playing a (for them) zero-sum game on reputation. If it would be on principle, they should just stop paying for APCs charged by commercial publishing houses all together.
The Innovation

Mar 3 at 10:26amWeb
Show threadAlbert CardonaMar 3

@mvargam

It's clear it's not on principle. What I find amusing is that the targeted journals are precisely those that were setup on the shadow of the prestigious ones to capture those juicy APCs (after PLoS ONE demonstrated there was a market for that), and which let academics write one half of the journal name in bold and the other in normal text, playing entirely into the let's-judge-books-by-their-covers.