during the holidays weekend, all but one of Elsevier’s editorial board members Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with deep sadness and great regret” according to Retraction Watchwhich helpfully provided a online PDF from the editors’ full statement. It’s the 20th mass resignation of a scientific journal since 2023 on various points of controversy, according to Retraction Watch, many of them in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry.
“This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us,” the board members wrote in their statement. “The editors who have led the journal for the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy to make JHE the leading journal for paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The (associate editors) have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; However, we discovered that we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience.”
The editorial board cited several changes made over the past ten years that it believes run counter to the magazine’s long-standing editorial principles. These included removing support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving the editorial board to handle those tasks. When the board expressed the need for a text editor, Elsevier’s response, they said, was “to maintain that editors should not pay attention to proper language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of nomenclature or formatting.” “.
There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which “will result in fewer EAs handling many more articles and on topics well outside their areas of expertise.” ”.
Additionally, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that will largely function as a figurehead, after Elsevier “unilaterally took full control” of the board structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts. annually, which the council believes undermines its independence and editorial integrity.
Worst practices
Internal production was reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reverting versions of articles that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. “This was very embarrassing for the magazine and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “AI processing continues to be used and periodically reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and format and requires extensive oversight from the author and editor during the testing stage.”
Additionally, JHE’s author page charges are significantly higher than even Elsevier’s other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals such as Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal’s authors can afford those fees, “which runs counter to the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) commitment to equality and inclusion,” the editors wrote.
The breaking point appears to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-publishers Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (California College of Osteopathic Medicine, Touro University) that it was ending the dual-publisher model that it has been in effect since 1986. When Grabowski and Taylor protested, they were told that the model could only stay if they accepted a 50 percent cut in her compensation.