August 10, 2006. The Editorial Board of Topology resigned effective 21 December 2006. The editors hope to have the support of the community in taking this step. Here is the letter.
October 13 2005. The Banff Protocol is online at http://members.cox.net/banffprotocol/. Please look at this web page and consider subscribing to the "Banff Protocol".
September 22 2005. Below is an email I recently sent to the journal "Topology."
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 17:08:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Walter Neumann To: Topology Subject: Re: Topology xxxx Dear Beverly (and Topology Editors) I just emailed you, Beverly, a referee's report on paper xxxx for Topology. [Comments on the paper deleted] If [that paper] is resubmitted to Topology, I am afraid that I will not be able to referee it. I'd be glad if you could pass on this email, which gives my reasons for this, to the editorial board of Topology. At a recent Topology meeting in Banff the participants met for an evening to discuss the issue of journal pricing. The feeling of many participants was that the overpricing of journals and the bundling policies instituted by many publishers are putting financial pressures on our libraries that are severely compromising them. Over twelve years ago, when I was involved in the purchasing decisions of the library at Ohio State University, the rising price of journals was already putting painful pressure from the books budget, although most important journals were still subscribed. Five years later I was in Melbourne, Australia, and subscription cuts due to price increases had come to the point that Australian university libraries could no longer assure that each important journal was available by interlibrary loan within Australia. As publishers' sense of responsibility moves from one of service to their customers to one of maximizing profits for their stockholders, the free service that we provide by refereeing and editing is no longer being returned to the academic community. At the meeting at Banff a "Banff Protocol" was proposed whose signers would agree not to submit papers nor provide service to journals whose pricing was seen as excessive. One proposal for what "excessive" would mean was a per page cost exceeding the average of the 25 mathematics journals at the top of the ISI list by "impact factor" (approx 52 cents/page). Other measures were proposed that led to somewhat higher figures, but ultimately the meeting did not come to an agreement. Despite this failure of agreement, several of us at the meeting agreed to abide by the spirit of the "Banff Protocol." I am therefore resigning from the editorial board of one journal and will refuse to referee papers for several. In particular, since the price of Topology is above all the proposed measures discussed at the time (and indeed, Elsevier was cited as one of the worst offenders regarding predatory pricing), I will no longer submit papers to nor referee papers for Topology until the pricing comes down to a reasonable level. Regards, Walter Neumann