Thursday, January 10th, 2019

Dear Ms. Mesquita, Dear Ludo,

Based on the letter from Ms. Mesquita on October 9, 2018, we would like to inform you that there are
insufficient grounds for us to continue our collaboration with Elsevier as members of the Editorial
Board of Journal of Informetrics (JOI). We therefore offer our resignation as JOI editorial board
members, effective immediately.

We are disappointed that ownership of JOI and the amount of Article Publishing Charges (APCs) of JOI
are non-negotiable for Elsevier. Moreover, we deeply regret that Elsevier is not willing to participate
in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). This initiative has broad support in the field of scientometrics
(http://issi-society.org/open-citations-letter/) and Elsevier is the only publisher in our field that has
not joined the initiative. Because our position on ownership, open access, and open citations is
fundamentally irreconcilable with the position of Elsevier, we consider it is no longer in the interest of
our community to continue working together with Elsevier as members of the JOI editorial board.

We will honor those obligations we have assumed for manuscripts currently under consideration. We
will not, however, assume any additional responsibilities for new submissions received.

Sincerely,

Vincent Larivière, Giovanni Abramo, Per Ahlgren, Judit Bar-Ilan, Johan Bollen, Lutz Bornmann, Kevin
Boyack, Quentin Burrell, Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, Wolfgang Glänzel, Raf Guns, Stefanie Haustein,
Loet Leydesdorff, Thierry Marchant, Stasa Milojević, Filippo Radicchi, Ismael Rafols, Ronald Rousseau,
Jesper W. Schneider, Henry Small, Min Song, Cassidy Sugimoto, Mike Thelwall, Nees Jan van Eck,
Anthony F.J. van Raan, Jevin West, Dietmar Wolfram, Paul Wouters, Erjia Yan