In March, the editors of Syntax, an academic journal in the field of linguistics, resigned from their positions in protest against changes imposed by Wiley, which has published the title for 26 years. In an open letter, linguists Klaus Abels of University College London, UK, and Suzanne Flynn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, stated that their positions had become untenable after Wiley assigned copyediting tasks to a production team with no specialist knowledge of linguistics in an effort to cut costs. According to the pair, the team is not capable of reliably dealing with foreign-language characters or sentence structure diagrams, among other issues, which jeopardizes the journal’s rigor and quality. Abels was a co-editor of Syntax since 2013 and Flynn was one of its founders.
In the open letter, they announced that they were founding a new journal, provisionally named Syntactic Theory and Research, which aims to take the mantle from Syntax and will use the diamond open access model, meaning no fees will be charged to publish articles or to read them. The journal will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a nonprofit publisher, and will be run based on voluntary and collaborative work by linguists.
This year alone, five other titles have experienced similar mass resignations. Last year, there were 12 cases, according to the Retraction Watch website. Michael Clarke, of the Washington-based Clarke & Esposito business management consultancy, told Nature that many of the resignations are responses to management model changes made by scientific communication companies, reflecting the desire of academic communities to maintain control over editorial decisions. According to Ivan Oransky, founder of Retraction Watch, the frequency of such resignations reveals the discord between the interests of publishers and the people responsible for the quality of the journals. “On one side you have publishers — most of them are for profit — that demand and require constant growth because that’s what the stock market requires. On the other, you have researchers, who champion quality and depth and time to review,” he told Nature. Wiley stated that it will continue to invest in Syntax, denying that the changes would compromise the journal’s quality.
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