Together with 17 different Affiliate Editors, I’ve simply resigned from the editorial board of Statistics and Computing. This was a tough determination, since it’s a nice journal, which has revealed many great articles beneath the management of editor-in-chief Ajay Jasra, and earlier than him David Hand, Gilles Celeux, and Mark Girolami.
Springer Nature just lately introduced that for all future articles, authors must pay Article Processing Fees of $2990. This can impose huge monetary limitations for colleagues who don’t have entry to funding, will create an additional hole between establishments, and the journal will ultimately lose its enchantment as authors publish elsewhere. We don’t want to be a part of this technique.
The complete letter despatched to the editor-in-chief is beneath, with the present listing of signatories. Different members of the board who want to signal it will possibly get it contact.
Pricey Ajay,
We’re writing to resign as Affiliate Editors of Statistics and Computing efficient 31 December 2026, as a result of Springer Nature’s latest determination to impose Article Processing Fees (APCs) upon all authors.
We have now the best admiration to your laborious work for this journal and for the scientific group: beneath your stewardship, and that of earlier Editors, the journal has revealed many articles of extraordinarily top quality and it’s a main journal in our discipline. It has been an honour to play a small half on this throughout our time as Affiliate Editors, and we resign with nice remorse.
We perceive that the choice to introduce APCs was not your individual however was imposed by company administration, and we’re sorry that our resignation will put you in a tough place. Nonetheless, the APCs that Springer Nature will introduce on 1st January 2027 are irreconcilable with our imaginative and prescient of science. They don’t seem to be suitable with the aim of publishing the perfect science, whoever the authors; they exclude huge swathes of the scientific group; they aren’t a accountable use of the taxpayers’ cash that funds our analysis; they’re additionally at odds with the requirements in Statistics.
Our determination to resign as a result of this alteration shouldn’t be taken as assist for the prevailing system. The present educational publishing system is constructed upon huge portions of unpaid labour and establishes a monetary paywall to view the ultimate analysis articles. Funding our bodies are fairly rightly pushing again in opposition to this, requiring that publicly funded analysis be freely accessible. From this angle the transfer to “open-access” at Statistics and Computing may appear to have some advantage on the floor. Nonetheless, reaching this by means of APCs merely strikes the monetary barrier to a distinct a part of the system. The exploitation nonetheless stays, and now Statistics and Computing will now not publish the perfect science, each as a result of monetary exclusion of these researchers who can not afford to pay, and people community-minded researchers who refuse to pay on precept.
We might be very supportive of making a brand new, genuinely open journal as an alternative, probably beneath the auspices of a discovered society. We might welcome the chance to work with different members of the editorial board to create such a journal, and could be glad to submit future work there. We hope to have conversations with the editorial board and the group about such a transfer.
We hope to stay involved with you. Thanks to your confidence,
Signatories thus far:
Pierre Alquier (ESSEC)
Julyan Arbel (Inria Grenoble)
Louis Aslett (Durham College)
Joshua Bon (Adelaide College)
Alice Cleynen (CNRS)
Adrien Corenflos (College of Warwick)
Francesca Romana Crucinio (College of Turin)
Kamélia Daudel (ESSEC)
Ritabrata Dutta (College of Warwick)
Mathieu Gerber (College of Bristol)
Sahani Pathiraja (College of New South Wales)
François Portier (CREST-ENSAI)
Sam Energy (College of Bristol)
Robin Ryder (Imperial Faculty London)
Leah South (Queensland College of Know-how)
Scott Sisson (College of New South Wales, Sydney)
David Warne (Queensland College of Know-how)
Olivier Zahm (Inria Grenoble)
