All but 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 fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”
“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.
Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”
In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.
The resigning editors also said Elsevier “unilaterally took full control over” the editorial board’s “scientific structure and composition” by requiring all editors sign a new contract every year,” leading to a decline in the number of associate editors. The publisher also “indicated it would no longer support the dual-editor [in chief] model that has been a hallmark of JHE since 1986,” according to the statement. “When the editors vehemently opposed this action, Elsevier said it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half.”
Editors also raised concerns about article processing charges at the journal of $3,990 that “remain out of reach for much of our authorship” and are as much as twice those “of discipline-comparable Elsevier-published journals.”
Attempts to seek comment from Elsevier and to learn the name of the associate editor who did not resign from the recently resigned editors in chief were met with holiday out-of-office replies. We will update this post with anything we learn. [Update, 1/6/25: We have now received a reply from Elsevier.]
The mass resignation is the 20th such episode since early 2023, according to our records. Earlier this year, Nature asked, “what do these group exits achieve?”
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The frequent introduction of errors is old news. I have had terrible experiences; not just changing capitualizations etc. but actually altering equations.
One more reason to prefer pre-prints, such that the version-of-record remains fully traceable.
But I didn’t know the new AI overlords are taking over copy-editing too. Though, maybe they’ll eventually do a better job, who knows…
The rent-seeking behavior of Elsevier and other publishers is well-known. With hard-copy publishing in science essentially gone, the need for a for-profit publisher is really up in the air.
The papers in a new journal are not indexed for the first three years after a new journal is founded, so that is probably the major obstacle to a new journal under a better financial model. Early career scientists can’t afford not to have their work indexed, for the purposes of tenure. Older scientists will probably have to step up here.
The authors should approve the changes on the last version of the article.
Using Latex editor it is easier to check
the format, and I usually make a comparison between the submitted text and the last review using regular edition tools. So it is also responsibility of the author to review before publication.
Maybe arxiv will remain…
Lol. Elsevier’s billions of dollars of profit made through the labour of a massive workforce of unpaid authors and referees has been an embarassment for many years and now they dont even want to pay a couple of copy editors? I gave up publishing in academic journals long ago as I believe in being paid for my work, not paying.This does of course have its drawbacks as academics ignore all work, no matter how good, unless it is done through the slave system. Time for the entire antiquated thirteenth century guild structure to be knocked over and redesigned.
That sole remaining assistant editor is going to be busy.
Glad that I published my last paper a couple years ago, especially as the page charges were brutal.
Now I understand why proofing at Elsevier is so bad, I was not aware of the use of AI. Last experience with them they replaced all “i”s for “l”s during the proof stage.
For profit academics isn’t academics, its just business.
Check out the Wikipedia entry for more criticisms of Elsevier. It says it’s a private company that is part of the publicly-traded RELX, a Dutch company undergoing mergers & acquisitions. I’m not familiar with this odd corporate structure, but as a private company there’s no entry point like a shareholder’s meeting to make one’s views known. They can do whatever they want—like Judy Faulkner & EPIC, one of my favorite companies to hate on.
Currently Elsevier retracting many paper due to critics on papermills.. so how they deal with this critics?, they blame on authors only. they retract the paper with authorship changes… Since when they have absolute right to decide who should in and out as author? Elsevier should be publisher and not act as academics court. If the authorship changes is not allowed, they should inform in their submission rules. For me, authorship changes is the accurate method to define papermills. This is objecting the academics free in decide about the works/articles.. The publication sector should reformed and transformed.
“If the authorship changes is not allowed, they should inform in their submission rules.”
Except the very rules for authorship changes are there, and have been there for a while. E.g., here: “The editors of this journal generally will not consider changes to authorship once a manuscript has been submitted,” etc.
Typing error
“For me, authorship changes is not accurate method to define papermills.”
I’d LOVE to read about Nature’s article on into what these mass resignations over publishers’ financial decisions but, unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall…
That’s a bit of a rough critique to comment on an article that is pointing out to you the damage that not paying human labor does to the product.
Exactly what I thought. Nature asked, “what do these group exits achieve?” and I say: Maybe on the long run that I won‘t have to pay to get the answer to the question.
Above all these arguments, authors should receive the fair share of their labour.