18 Associate Editors resign from Statistics and Computing editorial board: Problems with commercial scholarly publishing, and what does this all mean?

I was cc-ed on a message sent by 18 members of the board of the journal Statistics and Computing, quitting their posts because the publisher (Springer) has announced a new policy whereby all authors will have to pay publication charges. The soon-to-be-former associate editors write, “Statistics and Computing will no longer publish the best science, both due to financial exclusion of those researchers who cannot afford to pay, and those community-minded researchers who refuse to pay on principle.” I’ll put the full message, with its 18 signatories, below the fold. My reaction to all this is that it would be great if the journal could move to an open and free system such as is done by the Journal of Machine Learning Research–a journal that I believe was founded by people who had resigned from the editorial board of a commercial journal. Even commercial journals that begin with good intentions can develop fatal problems. For example, check out the sad story of the Berkeley Electronic…