The publisher of the Journal of Human Evolution says it does not use artificial intelligence in its production process, contrary to a statement issued last month by the journal’s editorial board when all but one member of the group resigned.
The statement, shared on X on December 26, noted the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” were resigning because Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, “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.” Among the examples cited:
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.
Retraction Watch has now received a response to a request for comment from an Elsevier spokesperson (our message on Dec. 26 was met with an out-of-office reply, and on Jan. 2 the company said it was still looking into the matter):
We sincerely thank the outgoing editors, the majority of whom were coming to the end of their term at the end of 2024, for their invaluable contributions and dedication to the journal. We will continue to build on their important work in maintaining the high quality expected of the journal with the new editorial team.
The response continued:
We do want to address an important inaccuracy in the statement issued by the outgoing editors, specifically the incorrect linking of a formatting glitch to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in our production processes. We do not use AI in our production processes. The journal trialled a production workflow that inadvertently introduced the formatting errors to which the editors refer. We had already acted on their feedback and reverted to the journal’s previous workflow earlier in 2024.
Meanwhile, according to the journal’s website, three new editors in chief have been appointed: Nohemi Sala of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain; Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing; and Radu Iovita of New York University’s Center for the Study of Human Origins.
The previous editors in chief, Mark Grabowski and Andrea B. Taylor, did not respond to our request for comment on the board’s resignation.
The mass resignation is the 20th such episode since early 2023, according to our records.
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If you call AI “production workflow”, then it’s not AI? Elsevier is playing word games.
I don’t know anything about this journal beyond what I’ve read here, but in the environmental sciences there’s been a general enshittification of Elsevier’s journals. Science of the Total Environment, Environmental Research, Environmental Pollution, Chemosphere – all recently removed from indexing at Clarivate’s WoS. These were solid, staid, journals, established in the 70s or 80s, that had developed strong reputations. Then some went through a period of massive growth over the last 8-10 years or so. STOTEN went from something like 2000 to 8500 articles a year. As an editor at a competing society journal with little growth over the period, I puzzled how they could have such massive output and yet have each article cited 8 times within only two years on the average. A JIF of 8 in other words. I assumed it was the Matthew effect. Plus allowing rampant cheating to occur with citation cartels and paper mills it turns out.
To be specific, Chemosphere was removed from the Master Journal List, STOTEN is now “on hold” and probably will be removed in the future. As far as I know, Environmental Pollution and Environmental Research are not (yet) on hold.
It’s really not exonerating to say that you didn’t use AI, given that you stopped capitalizing country names and italicizing species names due to a change you made in your workflow, didn’t notice until there were complaints…and then seem to want credit for fixing the problem. Did no human ever look critically at the output of this workflow?
Editing is work. If you cut humans out of the loop, with or without substituting AI, you should not complain when people notice and object to your shoddy workmanship.