During the holidays weekend, all but one member of the Elsevier editorial board Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with deep sadness and great regret” according to the Retraction Watchwho helpfully provided PDF on the Internet full editorial statement. It’s 20 mass resignation from a scientific journal from 2023 on various points of contention, according to Retraction Watch, many of which are in response to controversial changes in business models used in the scientific publishing industry.
“This was an extremely 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 enormous time and energy to make JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research, and they have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms have expired. The [associate editors] they were equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; However, we believe that we can no longer cooperate with Elsevier in good conscience.”
The editors cited several changes made over the last ten years, which in their opinion are contrary to the long-standing editorial principles of the magazine. These included eliminating support for the copy editor and special issues editor, leaving editorial staff to handle these responsibilities. When management expressed its need for an editor, Elsevier responded “by maintaining that editors should pay no attention to the language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.”
There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway, with the goal of reducing the number of associate editors by more than half, which “will result in fewer academic experts handling many more articles on topics well beyond their areas of expertise.”
Moreover, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that will serve largely as figureheads, after Elsevier “unilaterally assumed full control” of the board’s structure in 2023, requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually – which the board says undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
Worst practices
Internal production was reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using artificial intelligence in production without informing management, which resulted in many styling and formatting errors, as well as reversal of versions of articles that had already been accepted and formatted by editors. “This was extremely embarrassing for the journal, took six months to resolve, and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “Artificial intelligence processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting, requiring extensive author and editor supervision during the proofreading stage.”
Additionally, JHE’s author page fees are significantly higher than Elsevier’s other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals such as Scientific Reports. Few of the journal’s authors can afford such fees, “which runs counter to the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) commitment to equity and inclusivity,” the editors wrote.
The turning point appears to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (Touro University California College of Osteopathic Medicine) that it was ending the dual-editor model that had been in place since 1986. When Grabowski and Taylor protested , they were told that the model could only stay with the company if she agreed to a 50 percent pay cut.