During the vacations weekend, all however one member of Elsevier’s editorial board Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with honest disappointment and nice remorse”, according to Retraction Watchwho helpfully supplied a Online PDF of the complete assertion of the editors. It’s the twentieth mass resignation from a scientific journal since 2023 on varied factors of competition, in line with Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial adjustments within the enterprise fashions utilized by the scientific publishing trade.
“This was an exceptionally painful resolution for every of us,” the board members wrote of their assertion. “The editors who’ve run the journal for the previous 38 years have invested immense time and power in making JHE the main journal in paleoanthropological analysis and have remained loyal and dedicated to the journal and our authors lengthy after their tenures have ended. The (affiliate editors) have been equally loyal and dedicated. We all care deeply concerning the journal, our self-discipline, and our educational neighborhood; nonetheless, we discover that we are able to not work with Elsevier in good conscience.”
The editorial board cited a number of adjustments remodeled the previous decade that it believes are opposite to the journal’s long-standing editorial ideas. These included eliminating help for an editor and a particular points editor, leaving the editorial board to deal with these duties. When the board expressed the necessity for an editor, Elsevier’s response, it said, was “to argue that editors ought to pay no consideration to language, grammar, readability, coherence, or accuracy of right nomenclature or formatting.”
There can also be a significant restructuring of the editorial board underway that goals to scale back the variety of affiliate editors by greater than half, which “will end in fewer EAs operating many extra articles, and on matters nicely outdoors their areas of experience”.
Additionally, there are plans to create a third-level editorial board to perform largely as some extent determine, after Elsevier “unilaterally took full management” of the board construction in 2023 by requiring all affiliate editors to resume their contracts yearly, which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
Worse practices
Internal manufacturing was diminished or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier started utilizing synthetic intelligence throughout manufacturing with out informing the board of administrators, inflicting many type and formatting errors, in addition to reversing variations of paperwork that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. “This was very embarrassing for the journal and the decision took six months and was achieved solely via the persistent efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “AI processing continues for use and commonly reformats submitted manuscripts to vary that means and formatting and requires intensive creator and editor supervision throughout the proofing section.”
Furthermore, JHE’s creator web page prices are additionally considerably greater than Elsevier’s different for-profit journals, in addition to broad-based open entry journals equivalent to Scientific Reports. Not most of the journal’s authors can afford such charges, “which matches towards the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) dedication to equality and inclusiveness,” the editors wrote.
The breaking level seems to have are available in November, when Elsevier knowledgeable 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 mannequin that had been in place since 1986 When Grabowi and Taylor protested, they have been informed that the mannequin might solely keep in the event that they accepted a 50% reduce of their compensation.
