Over the vacation weekend, all however one member of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Magazine of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with heartfelt disappointment and nice remorseful about,” in step with Retraction Watch, which helpfully supplied an internet PDF of the editors’ complete remark. It’s the 20 th mass resignation from a science magazine since 2023 over quite a lot of issues of competition, in step with Retraction Watch, many according to debatable adjustments within the industry fashions utilized by the clinical publishing trade.
“This has been an exceptionally painful resolution for every people,” the board participants wrote of their remark. “The editors who’ve stewarded the magazine during the last 38 years have invested immense time and effort in making JHE the main magazine in paleoanthropological analysis and feature remained unswerving and dedicated to the magazine and our authors lengthy after their phrases ended. The [associate editors] were similarly unswerving and dedicated. All of us care deeply in regards to the magazine, our self-discipline, and our instructional group; on the other hand, we discover we will be able to now not paintings with Elsevier in just right judgment of right and wrong.”
The editorial board cited a number of adjustments made over the past ten years that it believes are counter to the magazine’s longstanding editorial rules. Those integrated getting rid of enhance for a duplicate editor and a distinct problems editor, leaving it to the editorial board to take care of the ones tasks. When the board expressed the desire for a duplicate editor, Elsevier’s reaction, they mentioned, was once “to handle that the editors must no longer be being attentive to language, grammar, clarity, consistency, or accuracy of correct nomenclature or formatting.”
There could also be a big restructuring of the editorial board underway that objectives to scale back the collection of affiliate editors through greater than part, which “will lead to fewer AEs dealing with way more papers, and on subjects neatly outdoor their spaces of experience.”
Moreover, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that purposes in large part in a figurehead capability, after Elsevier “unilaterally took complete regulate” of the board’s construction in 2023 through requiring all affiliate editors to resume their contracts yearly—which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
Worst Practices
In-house manufacturing has been diminished or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier started the usage of AI all through manufacturing with out informing the board, leading to many taste and formatting mistakes in addition to reversing variations of papers that had already been approved and formatted through the editors. “This was once extremely embarrassing for the magazine and backbone took six months and was once accomplished best during the continual efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “AI processing continues for use and ceaselessly reformats submitted manuscripts to switch which means and formatting and require intensive writer and editor oversight all through evidence degree.”
As well as, the writer web page fees for JHE are considerably upper than even Elsevier’s different for-profit journals, in addition to broad-based open get entry to journals like Medical Stories. Now not most of the magazine’s authors can manage to pay for the ones charges, “which runs counter to the magazine’s (and Elsevier’s) pledge of equality and inclusivity,” the editors wrote.
The verge of collapse turns out to have are available November, when Elsevier knowledgeable coeditors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores College) and Andrea Taylor (Touro College California Faculty of Osteopathic Medication) that it was once finishing the dual-editor style that has been in position since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they have been informed the style may just best stay in the event that they took a 50 p.c lower of their reimbursement.
