Open access solutions for biodiversity journals: Do not replace one problem with another

A. Townsend Peterson*, Robert P. Anderson, Maria Beger, Janine Bolliger, Lluís Brotons, Christopher P. Burridge, Marlon E. Cobos, Angela P. Cuervo-Robayo, Minin E Di, Jeffrey Diez, Jane Elith, Clare B. Embling, Luis E. Escobar, Franz Essl, Kenneth J. Feeley, Lucy Hawkes, D Jimenez-Garcia, Laura Jimenez, David M. Green, Eva KnopI Kuehn, José J. Lahoz-Monfort, Andres Lira-Noriega, Jorge M. Lobo, Rafael Loyola, Nally R Mac, Fernando Machado-Stredel, E Martinez-Meyer, Michael McCarthy, Cory Merow, Javier Nori, C Nunez-Penichet, Luis Osorio-Olvera, P Pysek, M Rejmanek, Anthony Ricciardi, Mark Robertson, Soto O Rojas, Daniel Romero-Alvarez, Núria Roura-Pascual, Luca Santini, David S. Schoeman, B Schroeder, Jorge Soberon, Diederik Strubbe, Wilfried Thuiller, Anna Traveset, Eric A. Treml, T Vaclavik, Sara Varela, James E.M. Watson, Yolanda Wiersma, Brendan Wintle, Carlos Yanez-Arenas, Damaris Zurell

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, many or most scholarly journals in biodiversity, ecology, biogeography and conservation were owned and published by scientific societies and made available to the broader scientific community at relatively low cost. However, the past several decades have seen a dominant process of commercialization of the publication process in this field, either by commercial publishing firms taking over publication of journals owned by a society (e.g., Evolution), or by commercial publishers starting new journals to fill “niches” that were until then empty in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Diversity and Distributions is an example of this latter category of journals, having been created by Wiley Publishers in 1993 (as Biodiversity Letters). Being a journal owned by a commercial publisher, it has always been accessed by readers via subscription, but the publication process has been free to potential authors whose work has passed peer review.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5-8
Number of pages0
JournalDiversity and Distributions: a journal of conservation biogeography
Volume25
Issue number1
Early online date9 Jan 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2019

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