“The Cognition community is bubbling with discussion both within the editorial circles and among contributors and readers, too,” Barner wrote in an email. “We see this as a healthy process that is best left undisturbed by further action on our part.” Now that the petition is out there, in other words, Barner and Snedeker are relying on organic conversations within the academic community to help their movement pick up steam.

The Cognition petition builds on momentum from a recent shake-up at Lingua, another Elsevier journal. Last November, all of Lingua’s six editors and 31 editorial-board members resigned after Elsevier rejected their requests for lower APCs, the right for authors to retain copyright over their own work, and, most radically, ownership of the journal. In their letter to Elsevier, the board asked that ownership of the journal be transferred to the collective of editors at no cost, and for the right to move the journal to a different publisher with six months’ notification.

After leaving their positions at Lingua, the editors started a new open-access journal called Glossa. The new journal charges a $400 APC to authors, and waives that fee for authors who do not have the funds. Lingua’s APC, by contrast, is still $1,800, the same as it was before the previous editorial board’s departure. In a statement issued in November, Elsevier said that a $400 APC is “not sustainable.”

However, the company does have several titles with $500 APCs, so I asked David Clark, Elsevier’s senior vice president of publishing, how the company determines those prices. He explained that the price for each journal depends in part on “the appetite” from different fields; presumably, a more well-funded field will have more money available to pay APCs. According to Elsevier’s website, it also depends on factors like “competitive considerations” and “market conditions,” like how much other competing companies are charging.

Johan Rooryck, the former editor-in-chief of Lingua and the current editor-in-chief of Glossa, refers to hybrid journals as “double-dipping journals” because they profit from both APCs and subscriptions. Though Elsevier’s official policy states that the company does not charge subscribers for open-access papers, many scientists share Rooryck’s view of hybrid journals as a money grab. Last February, some vented their frustrations by poking fun at the company with the hashtag #ElsevierValentines (one highlight: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / We’ve gone open access / So authors pay too!”).

Scientists’ frustration is compounded by indications that academic publishers are turning a tidy profit from their labor and free contributions (peer reviews, like the articles themselves, are given to journals for free). Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis have all reported profit margins around 35 percent, more than Facebook (27 percent) or the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world (29 percent).