Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off the shackles of “publishers” that have made themselves our masters rather than our servants.

Excellent news this morning in a press-release from the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics : The part that I like most here is the sense that it’s part of an inevitable and historic shift away from legacy publishers and their subscription paywalls.

This week, psychologists are the newest group of scholars to learn that their “publishers” are dedicated to preventing their work from being made public. The American Psychological Association launched a pilot to monitor and seek removal of unauthorized online postings of APA journal articles.

This is an important question, and one that is all too easy to overlook. No doubt the editorial board of Lingua assumed that they owned and controlled their journal, right up to the moment they decided to find a different publisher who would help them transition to reasonably priced open access.