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During the party weekend, all but one member of Elsevier’s editorial board Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with sincere sadness and great regret”, according to Retraction Watchwhich usefully provided a Online PDF of the publishers’ full statement. It’s the 20th mass resignations from a scientific journal from 2023 on various points of contention, for Retraction Watch, many 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,” board members wrote in their statement. “The editors who have run the journal for the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after at the end of their terms. They (associate editors) have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline and our academic community we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience.”
The editorial board has cited several changes made over the past ten years that it believes are contrary to the journal’s long-standing editorial principles. These include eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issue editor, leaving it up to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier’s response, they said, was “to maintain that editors should not pay attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of nomenclature or proper formatting”.
There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway which aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which “will result in fewer AEs managing many more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of knowledge”.
In addition, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that will function largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier “unilaterally took full control” of the board structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their annual contracts – that the board believes. undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
Worst practices
Internal production was reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began to use AI during production without informing the board, which resulted in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversal of versions of documents that were already accepted and formed by the editors. “This was very embarrassing for the magazine and the resolution took six months and was only achieved through the persistent efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “The AI process continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and requires extensive author and editor oversight during the proofing phase.”
In addition, author page costs for JHE are significantly higher than other for-profit Elsevier journals as well as broad open access journals such as Scientific Reports. Few journal authors can afford these fees, “which goes against the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) commitment to equality and inclusiveness,” wrote the editors.
The breaking point appears to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (California Touro University of Osteopathic Medicine) that it was ending the dual-editor model it is in place since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they said the model could only exist if they took 50 percent in their compensation.
