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.
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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