on holiday Weekend, all but one member of Elsevier's editorial board Human Development Journal (JHE) resigned “with heartache and great regret”. According to Retraction Watchwho helpfully provided a online pdf Full statement from the editors. this is the 20th mass resignation According to Retraction Watch, a science journal is at various points in contention from 2023, in response to controversial changes to the business models used by many scientific publications industry.
“This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us,” board members wrote in their statement. “The editors who have led the journal over the past 38 years have invested a lot of time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors even after their tenures have ended. [associate editors] Have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; However, we have found that we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience.”
The editorial board cited a number of changes made over the past ten years that they believed were contrary to the magazine's long-standing editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving those duties to the editorial board to handle. When the Board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, he said, was “to maintain that editors should not focus on accuracy of language, grammar, readability, consistency, or proper naming or formatting.”
A major restructuring of the editorial board is also underway, with the aim of reducing the number of associate editors by more than half, resulting in “fewer AEs handling far more papers, and working on topics outside their areas of expertise.”
Additionally, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a major capacity, with Elsevier “unilateralizing” the board's structure by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually in 2023. took complete control from” – which the Board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
worst practices
In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without notifying the board, resulting in numerous style and formatting errors as well as errors previously reported by editors. Versions of the papers that were accepted and drafted were reversed. “This was extremely embarrassing for the magazine and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the continued efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “The use of AI processing is ongoing and submitted manuscripts are regularly reformatted to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during the proof stage.”
Furthermore, author page charges for JHE are significantly higher than Elsevier's other for-profit journals as well as broad-based open access journals such as Scientific Reports. “Many of the journal's authors cannot afford those fees, which run contrary to the journal's (and Elsevier's) pledge of equality and inclusivity,” the editors wrote.
The breaking point appears to have come in November, when Elsevier informed co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (Touro University California College of Osteopathic Medicine) that it was ending the dual-editorship that had been in place since 1986. Ending the model. When Grabocki and Taylor protested, they were told that the model could survive only if they would cut their compensation by 50 percent.