Here is an open letter Robin Ryder and seventeen other aeditors of Statistics & Computing posted yesterday:
Along with 17 other Associate Editors, I have just resigned from the editorial board of Statistics and Computing. This was a difficult decision, since it is a great journal, which has published many tremendous articles under the leadership of editor-in-chief Ajay Jasra, and before him David Hand, Gilles Celeux, and Mark Girolami.
Springer Nature recently announced that for all future articles, authors would have to pay Article Processing Charges of $2990. This will impose massive financial barriers for colleagues who do not have access to funding, will create a further gap between institutions, and the journal will eventually lose its appeal as authors publish elsewhere. We do not wish to be part of this system.
The full letter sent to the editor-in-chief is below, with the current list of signatories. Other members of the board who wish to sign it can get it touch.
Dear Ajay,
We are writing to resign as Associate Editors of Statistics and Computing effective 31 December 2026, due to Springer Nature’s recent decision to impose Article Processing Charges (APCs) upon all authors.
We have the greatest admiration for your hard work for this journal and for the scientific community: under your stewardship, and that of previous Editors, the journal has published many articles of extremely high quality and it is a leading journal in our field. It has been an honour to play a small part in this during our time as Associate Editors, and we resign with great regret.
We understand that the decision to introduce APCs was not your own but was imposed by corporate management, and we are sorry that our resignation will put you in a difficult position. Nonetheless, the APCs that Springer Nature will introduce on 1st January 2027 are irreconcilable with our vision of science. They are not compatible with the goal of publishing the best science, whoever the authors; they exclude vast swathes of the scientific community; they are not a responsible use of the taxpayers’ money that funds our research; they are also at odds with the standards in Statistics.
Our decision to resign due to this change should not be taken as support for the existing system. The current academic publishing system is built upon vast quantities of unpaid labour and establishes a financial paywall to view the final research articles. Funding bodies are quite rightly pushing back against this, requiring that publicly funded research be freely accessible. From this perspective the move to “open-access” at Statistics and Computing might seem to have some merit on the surface. However, achieving this through APCs simply moves the financial barrier to a different part of the system. The exploitation still remains, and now 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.
We would be very supportive of creating a new, genuinely open journal instead, possibly under the auspices of a learned society. We would welcome the opportunity to work with other members of the editorial board to create such a journal, and would be glad to submit future work there. We hope to have conversations with the editorial board and the community about such a move.
We hope to remain in contact with you. Thank you for your confidence,
Signatories so far:
Pierre Alquier (ESSEC)
Julyan Arbel (Inria Grenoble)
Louis Aslett (Durham University)
Joshua Bon (Adelaide University)
Alice Cleynen (CNRS)
Adrien Corenflos (University of Warwick)
Francesca Romana Crucinio (University of Turin)
Kamélia Daudel (ESSEC)
Ritabrata Dutta (University of Warwick)
Mathieu Gerber (University of Bristol)
Sahani Pathiraja (University of New South Wales)
François Portier (CREST-ENSAI)
Sam Power (University of Bristol)
Robin Ryder (Imperial College London)
Leah South (Queensland University of Technology)
Scott Sisson (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
David Warne (Queensland University of Technology)
Olivier Zahm (Inria Grenoble)
