Many scientific articles are currently published in subscription journals and locked behind paywalls. This model impedes research and diverts public funding to parasitic publishers, while relying almost entirely on the unpaid work of researchers. We believe that science should evolve towards a different publishing model in which all scientific publications are freely available to readers as open access, without charging authors unfair prices.
For this reason, we will avoid serving as peer reviewers for venues that do not make publicly available the research that we review. Instead, we will give priority to open-access venues in how we allocate our reviewing time and organizational efforts.
Read the FAQ for more about open access and this pledge.
This is a really nice initiative, but I think its got the thrust a bit wrong. Requiring Open-Access just sets journals on the predatory path of requiring authors to pay.
The demand should instead be for journals to mandate preprint archival (and no embargo on updating it with post-peer-review changes other than journal-enhanced formatting).
