The majority of the editorial board of a top psychology journal have resigned en masse after the publisher replaced the journal’s editors without warning. Also departing are the honorary editor and statistical consultants.
The journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, is a Karger title and “the official journal of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine and the World Federation for Psychotherapy,” according to its website.
Christna Chap, head of editorial development for Karger, called the change in the journal’s leadership a “normal editorial transition” which “may have been misunderstood by some members of the community, leading them to criticize the journal and encourage others to do the same based on incorrect information.”
“We are concerned about these actions,” Chap said, “but look forward to shortly appointing new leadership for the Editorial Board of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics with whom we will work closely to define the next developmental stage of the journal.”
Retraction Watch has catalogued mass editorial resignations from at least 20 other scientific journals since 2023, for a variety of reasons. With publishers increasingly adopting a business model of charging article processing fees and aiming to publish more articles, editors have grown concerned about quality and stress on the peer review process, as our Ivan Oransky recently explained on Science Friday.
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics boasts an impact factor of 16.3 and CiteScore of 29.4, with an acceptance rate of 14%. In a December 10 editorial, Jenny Guidi and Fiametta Cosci, then the editors in chief, wrote that the journal’s impact factor ranked it fourth among psychiatry journals and the same among psychology journals.
The day after the editorial was published, Karger’s publication manager notified Guidi by email that her contract would not be renewed at the end of its term, and “it was time for the journal to take a new direction,” Guidi told Retraction Watch. Her access to the submission system had already been revoked. She emailed Karger’s chairwoman and the company CEO asking for clarification, “since it all had happened without justified reasons,” but didn’t receive an answer.
“I was fired about seven months before contract termination,” Guidi said. She called the episode a “deplorable, unexpected situation.”
Cosci, an associate professor at the University of Florence in Italy, resigned from her role, and is now editor in chief of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, an Elsevier title.
Karger replaced Guidi, Cosci and their assistant editors with an employee as managing editor, according to Giovanni Fava, honorary editor of the journal. Fava served as editor in chief for 30 years, and in 2022 handed off the role to Guidi and Cosci as his chosen successors.
Karger’s decision to replace the editorial leadership “was taken without consulting me and the editorial board,” Fava said. In response, he, the journal’s statistical consultants, and 70% of the editorial board members resigned, according to a comparison of the journal’s current editorial board listing and an archived version of the webpage from last September.
“The event is in line with the growing attacks of publishers to the independence of editors and editorial board which led to mass resignations in other journals,” Fava said. He cited previous coverage by Retraction Watch of editorial mass resignations as showing “corporate interests … disregard the work of scientists who spend their time and energies for preserving intellectual freedom and the ethics of publishing.”
Fava described “frictions” between the journal editors and publisher, such as “the very slow production time and its quality,” and the publication manager’s desire to start issuing calls for papers and commissioning articles.
The publisher’s production issues delayed the publication of articles and release of issues, Guidi said, and led to “inconsistencies and gross errors.” The publication manager also proposed strategies such as instituting special issues and using computerized tools to automatically find reviewers. The proposed strategies “did not apply to our top journal, or eventually run counter [to] its unique identity and intellectual freedom,” Guidi said. “Therefore, I generally denied those proposals, based on well-founded scientific reasons.”
Cosci said she “had a positive experience” at Karger. “I was not involved in any steps following my resignation thus I have nothing to say about my colleagues’ decision to resign en masse,” she added.
Despite Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics’ reputation, and the efforts of its editors, submissions to the journal had decreased in the last five years, “to the point of regularly experiencing difficulties having enough content to publish new issues at the scheduled times,” Chap said.
With Cosci’s resignation and Guidi’s contract ending, Chap said, “in light of the continuing difficulties the journal was experiencing, we informed Professor Guidi within the standard notice period that we would not renew her contract at its conclusion.” The publisher “first informed Professor Guidi, then the Editorial Board, and the affiliated societies who collaborate with the Karger-owned journal.”
“It is to be expected that a change in editorship comes with changes to the editorial board,” Chap said, “in particular when a number of the members have worked with the journal and the former Editors for more than 10 years.” She said it was “great to see” about 30% of the editorial board members remaining, and some were suggesting candidates for the next editor in chief. “Karger is also currently working closely with the affiliated societies on the journal’s future, including receiving their recommendation for a potential candidate,” Chap said.
The editorial board “did not get any announcement from the publisher” about the journal’s change in leadership, Richard Balon, an editorial board member from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich, told Retraction Watch. He learned of the decision “through the grapevine” and contacted Karger leadership for an explanation. The answers he got were “very vague,” he said, and “suggested that they would like to take the journal in some new direction.”
Balon resigned because he felt he and the entire editorial board “was ignored and not given any information (after years of free service),” he disagreed with Guidi’s firing, and was suspicious about Cosci’s departure. He also said he did not understand what the publisher’s desired “new direction” meant, given the journal’s strong metrics.
“I have the feeling that the bottom line is not going to be the excellent quality of the journal, but money,” Balon said. “I have worked for other journals/publishers who treat their editors and editorial boards better.”
Massimo Biondi, a professor emeritus of the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, also said he resigned from the editorial board because the publisher gave them “no meaningful response” and “no information about a sudden change.”
“We, and the institutions we represent, do not deserve such a treatment from the Publisher,” he said.
“What happened to Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics is certainly astonishing, particularly in view of its reputation and scientific standards,” Guidi said. She was “impressed” by the mass resignation, she said. “This is a sign of the intellectual values that we share and should be preserved despite adversities.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].