Editors at Science Journal Resign En Masse Over Bad Use of AI, High Fees

during holidays Over the weekend, all but one Elsevier editorial board member Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) Resigns “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” According to the withdrawal observationwhich helps provide Online PDF Editor’s full statement. This is the 20th collective resignation According to Retraction Watch, the journal has been removed from a scientific journal since 2023 over various points of contention, many of which were in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. .

“This is an incredibly painful decision for each of us,” board members wrote in a statement. “Over the past 38 years, the editors who manage the journal have invested considerable time and effort in making JHE a leading journal in paleoanthropological research, and remain committed to the journal and our authors long after their tenure has ended. Stay loyal and committed. [associate editors] Equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline and our academic community; however, we find that we can no longer in good conscience work with Elsevier.

The editorial board cited several changes over the past decade that it believed violated the journal’s longstanding editorial principles. These include removing support for copy editors and special issues editors, leaving it to the editorial board to handle these responsibilities. They said that when the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier’s response was to “insist that an editor should not be concerned with language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of correct terminology or formatting.”

A major reorganization of the editorial board is underway, aiming to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which “will result in fewer AEs working on more papers, and on topics well beyond their areas of expertise.”

Additionally, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that would operate primarily as figureheads after Elsevier took “unilateral full control” of the board structure in 2023 and required all associate editors to renew their contracts annually – something the board felt undermined its editorial independence and integrity.

worst approach

In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023, Elsevier began using artificial intelligence in the production process without notifying the board, resulting in numerous style and formatting errors and the inversion of versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors . “This is extremely embarrassing for the journal and the resolution took six months and was achieved through the tireless efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “Artificial intelligence processing continues to be used, with regular reformatting Submitted manuscripts undergo changes in meaning and format and require extensive oversight by the author and editor during the proofreading phase.”

In addition, JHE’s author page charges are much higher than even Elsevier’s other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals such as Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal’s authors can afford these fees, “which goes against the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) commitment to equality and inclusion,” the editors wrote.

The turning point seemed to come in November, when Elsevier notified co-editors Mark Grabowski (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andrea Taylor (Touro University, California College of Osteopathic Medicine) that it would end the dual-editing model that had existed since 1986 When Grabowski and Taylor protested, they were told they could only keep the models if they took a 50% salary cut.