From apt Fri Dec 17 13:09:12 1999 To: Egidio Astesiano, Jan Bergstra , janb@phil.uu.nl, "Krzysztof R. Apt", Richard Bird, Dines Bjoerner, Manfred Broy, Luca Cardelli, "Loe M.G. Feijs", Marie-Claude Gaudel, Carlo Ghezzi, Michael Jackson, jacksonma@acm.org, Paul Klint, Leslie Lamport, Christian Lengauer, "Peter A. Lindsay", Luqi, Maurice Nivat, Amir Pnueli, Bran Selic, John Tucker, Peter Wegner, Egidio Astesiano Subject: resignation from the editorial board of SCP Cc: elli@disi.unige.it, paulk Dear Egidio and Jan, I would like to resign from the editorial board of Science of Computer Programming. The direct reason is that I accepted the same position, a book section editor, in a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). I shall still send to Elsevier two more book reviews I am handling. The indirect reason is that I find Elsevier's pricing policy inacceptable. I take this opportunity to inform you and others that the end of November the editors of another Elsevier journal, the Journal of Logic Programming (JLP), collectively resigned after 16 month long unsuccessful negotations aimed at lowering the price of the library subscriptions. They all moved to the Cambridge University Press to start a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). The new journal will be per page approximately 55% cheaper than the JLP. I was deeply involved in these negotations in my capacity of the president of the Association for Logic Programing (> 400 members) and eventually realized that Elsevier would not yield. I fail to understand what we gain by doing voluntary work for the publishers who treat our articles as commercial products on which they beef up their profits. By doing quietly this voluntary work for commercial publishers we contribute to the decline of our libraries. It is time that we start looking at the price tags of the journals we support. If you are interested to know how this generated profit is used, then please have a look at the article WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO of Michael Barr, the chairman of the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) publications committee: http://www-mathdoc.ujf-grenoble.fr/NSPI/Numeros/1999-229.html#1 I am by no means the only one who is concerned by the pricing of scientific journals by commercial publishers. They are largely responsible for the dramatic decline of the quality of our libraries who on the average carry half of the titles they had 10 years ago. I quote from the most interesting article of David Shulenberger, Provost of the University of Kansas (http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/133/shulenburger.html): "ARL's [Association of Research Libraries] statistics show their [scientific journals] unit cost to have climbed 169% from 1986 to 1997, while monographs went up 62% and the CPI went up 46%. Surely a cost increase nearly quadruple that of the general level of prices warrants our attention. " The ARL site is full of articles about the decline of scientific libraries due to these price increases and about the need of viewing information as a public good. Elsevier has been certainly one of the leaders in driving these prices up and its journals and books belong to the most expensive journals in the field, for no reason whatsoever. Its journals, such as SCP, are up to 5 times more expensive than the ACM journals or IEEE journals and they are not better. In my opinion the only simple way to improve the situation is by starting to create new, inexpensive journals with non-profit publishers and hoping that eventually the authors will vote with their submissions. This is what the logic programming community just did and I am very proud of our decision. I allow myself to copy this email to the other editors. Hopefully, this way I shall make you all more aware of what is happening in the world of publishing. Best regards, Krzysztof Apt