All however one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are essentially incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude sustaining the standard and integrity elementary to JHE’s success.”
“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure important to the success of the journal whereas concurrently undermining the core ideas and practices which have efficiently guided the journal for the previous 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or energetic within the discipline, and all however one Associate Editor” stated of their resignation assertion posted to X/Twitter yesterday.
Among different strikes, in keeping with the assertion, Elsevier “eradicated help for a duplicate editor and particular points editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors shouldn’t be listening to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of correct nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the writer “continuously introduces errors throughout manufacturing that weren’t current within the accepted manuscript:”
In fall of 2023, for instance, with out consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the usage of AI throughout manufacturing, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all correct nouns (e.g., formally acknowledged epochs, web site names, nations, cities, genera, and many others.) as nicely italics for genera and species. These AI adjustments reversed the accepted variations of papers that had already been correctly formatted by the dealing with editors. This was extremely embarrassing for the journal and backbone took six months and was achieved solely via the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues for use and often reformats submitted manuscripts to vary that means and formatting and require intensive creator and editor oversight throughout proof stage.
The resigning editors additionally stated Elsevier “unilaterally took full management over” the editorial board’s “scientific construction and composition” by requiring all editors signal a brand new contract yearly,” resulting in a decline within the variety of affiliate editors. The writer additionally “indicated it could now not help the dual-editor [in chief] mannequin that has been an indicator of JHE since 1986,” in keeping with the assertion. “When the editors vehemently opposed this motion, Elsevier stated it could help a dual-editor mannequin by reducing the compensation charge by half.”
Editors additionally raised considerations about article processing expenses on the journal of $3,990 that “stay out of attain for a lot of our authorship” and are as a lot as twice these “of discipline-comparable Elsevier-published journals.”
Attempts to hunt remark from Elsevier and to study the identify of the affiliate editor who didn’t resign from the just lately resigned editors in chief had been met with vacation out-of-office replies. We will replace this publish with something we study.
The mass resignation is the twentieth such episode since early 2023, in keeping with our data. Earlier this yr, Nature requested, “what do these group exits obtain?”
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