Yesterday, the Critical Public Health Network announced in a press release a mass resignation of the Taylor & Francis publication Critical Public Health’s editorial board. The board cited “fundamentally different perspectives” on the process and purpose of scholarly publishing. Their new publication, Journal of Critical Public Health (JCPH), utilizes PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) hosted at the University of Calgary to take back control of publishing and regain scholarly independence for the Network’s publication.
The Co-Editors Judith Green and Lindsay McLaren of T&F’s Critical Public Health were joined by the additional 43 scholars on the Editorial Board in a resignation letter that emphasized the changes enacted by the publisher that undermined the journal’s scholarly leadership and oversight:
The new contract and amendment issued to the editors make clear the limited role the publisher sees for the editorial team and board. In reiterating the rights of the publisher to determine the funding model and volume of articles that will be published, we believe Taylor & Francis have significantly eroded our ability to set strategic direction… Our resignation responds to our commitment to upholding the values we hold dear in serving our academic and practitioner community.
The new Journal of Critical Public Health is clear about its values. It will “explore issues of equity, power, social justice and oppression” in health issues, even as the editors and board has recently moved, as noted in their press release, against scholarship that is treated as a “commodity that is marketed by a commercial publisher” rather than first and foremost a social and public good.
Indeed, a 2021 editorial by Kirsten Bell, a Master of Publishing graduate of Simon Fraser University and a member of Libraria, the open access advocacy scholarly group co-founded by PKP, along with Editorial Board members Judith Green, Lindsay McLaren, and Oliver Mweemba, outlines some of the tensions that led to this defection: “Is the ‘journal’ now merely a container, whose primary purpose is to signal ‘quality’ in a metricised academic world where a scholar’s worth is determined by the prestige of the outlets they publish in?”
As a response to their community’s needs and values, the new JCPH Editorial Board has set up their own journal using PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) at the University of Calgary (U of C), which hosts over 30 journals on the system, and is a Silver member of the PKP community that supports this project. The new journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Lindsay McLaren, is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at U of C.
PKP stands with the Editors and Editorial Board of JCPH in their decision to strike out on the path of scholarly independence and walk away from whatever perks, prestige, and swag is offered by the corporate publishing oligarchy. The defection of scholars and societies is one source of inspiration for PKP’s continuing research and development of free and open source software (FOSS) publishing platforms that are now in use by more than 30,000 journals publishing in 60 languages across 156 countries.
This “declaration of scholarly independence” is one that we hope more editors and scholarly societies will give very serious consideration, as they become more aware of the dissonance between their own values and these unjustifiable publishing practices. PKP is keen to support those who wish to learn more about making such a move. We are fully prepared to answer questions, demonstrate the scholarly publishing software, and dive into the many ways in which not only OJS, but Open Monograph Press (OMP) and Open Preprint Systems (OPS) as well, can help you achieve your goals of scholarly independence.
Contact us to start the conversation!
