The editorial board of another academic journal has resigned en masse to set up an alternative title after a split with a major publisher over the direction it was taking the periodical.
The entire 44-strong editorial board of Critical Public Health, owned by the UK-based publisher Taylor & Francis, announced their resignation in a letter, becoming the latest board to publicly dissent from a major vendor.
The Dutch behemoth Elsevier shed an editorial board in April and faced threats from another in June, over what members said were exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) and unreasonable annual publishing targets, among other concerns about its business model. Editors have also stepped down from journals owned by Wiley and MDPI.
Co-editors Judith Green and Lindsay McLaren, from the University of Exeter and the University of Calgary, said in the letter that the 44-year-old journal was “a forum for scholar-activists to publish work that illuminates and challenges power relations that shape all aspects of public health” but that it had become “increasingly difficult to maintain that vision under corporate ownership and control”.
