Not Elsevier, this time. The rumor is that SAGE Publications, the corporate publisher of the journal Political Theory, have bypassed the journal's editorial board and unilaterally imposed a new editor. As one commenter (6/17 6:44 on the first thread below) states, "The idea that the editorship of the journal is to be determined directly by them, apparently with no formal consultation with members of the existing editorial community, is like the idea of a faculty search being run by a couple of corporate honchos from a University's Board of Trustees, without consultation with current members of the faculty of the relevant department."

See here, here, and here for discussion, but so far (despite a signed statement by one of the editorial board members) there's a lot more heat than light.




Comments:

tcpip:
2009-07-03T00:38:46Z

One anonymous commentator expressed my opinion better and quicker:

I don't see how the post-coup PolThy journal is going to survive. Everyone on the executive committee and board will resign in protest and major scholars will publicly refuse to submit pieces to the journal or write reviews for it. It will be successfully reconstituted elsewhere and Sage and the new editor will be left with what is effectively a graduate student journal.
11011110:
2009-07-03T00:43:37Z
Apparently (near the end of the second thread) the professor they intended as their new editor has resigned, and (first comment of third thread) Sage is saying it was all a big mistake. So it could survive by pretending nothing happened and continuing as it was, I suppose.
leonardo_m:
2009-07-03T11:08:42Z
'mistake' for them means commercial mistake, a commercial decision gone wrong because of 'silly' academic ethics... :-)
11011110:
2009-07-03T16:24:53Z
I agree; I have no illusions that they intended to mean that the political scientists misinterpreted what they were doing. But regardless, they seem to be backing off.