Editorial board of human evolution journal resigns en masse
I once published an article in a proprietary journal. It was new, it had no page charges, and I had no funding. Little did I know that it was the bare tip of an iceberg of proprietary journals that would, among other faults, strain university libraries to the breaking point. I have been apologizing ever since.
It gets worse. A day or so ago, a colleague sent us a post that included a press release to the effect that the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution, a proprietary Elsevier journal, had resigned en masse. Elsevier is an academic publishing firm that, according to Wikipedia, enjoyed a profit of £2.3 billion and a profit margin of 33 % in 2023.
According to the press release, which was posted by Mark Grabowski, a co-editor with Andrea B. Taylor, the Journal of Human Evolution is the “flagship journal in paleoanthropological and human evolution research,” but “Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining [its] core principles and practices….” The editors note, among other complaints, that Elsevier has eliminated the position of copy editor on the grounds that “the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The result is that errors that were not found in the original manuscript are introduced during the production of the paper. The editors further complain about the cost of page charges and open access charges to institutions, and the relative paucity of institutions with whom Elsevier has negotiated open access agreements.
The two editors-in-chief, the emeritus editors, and all associate editors but one, “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” therefore have resigned.
Finally, there is an elephant in the room, and he is hiding in plain sight in footnote 2: artificial intelligence. The press release notes that, without telling anyone, Elsevier introduced artificial intelligence during some phase of production and generated articles in which proper nouns (including epochs, site names, countries, cities, and genera) were not capitalized, and genera and species were not italicized. Thus, papers that had been properly formatted became embarrassingly wrong, and it took the persistent efforts of the editors over six months to resolve the problem. The footnote concludes, “AI processing … regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.”
For more, see Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier’s changes in Retraction Watch. You may find Elsevier’s open access agreements here; there are only a couple of dozen or so in the United States. My thanks to several Panda’s Thumbelinos for providing the press release and making perceptive suggestions ahead of my drafting the present post.