Evolution Journal Editors Resign En Masse (arstechnica.com) 38
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jennifer Ouellette: Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. "This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."
The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting." There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which "will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise." Furthermore, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier "unilaterally took full control" of the board's structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually -- which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. "This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors," the editors wrote. "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." In addition, the author page charges for JHE are significantly higher than even Elsevier's other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals like Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal's authors can afford those fees, "which runs counter to the journal's (and Elsevier's) pledge of equality and inclusivity," the editors wrote. The breaking point seems 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-editor model that has been in place since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they were told the model could only remain if they took a 50 percent cut in their compensation.
The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting." There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which "will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise." Furthermore, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier "unilaterally took full control" of the board's structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually -- which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.
In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. "This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors," the editors wrote. "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." In addition, the author page charges for JHE are significantly higher than even Elsevier's other for-profit journals, as well as broad-based open access journals like Scientific Reports. Not many of the journal's authors can afford those fees, "which runs counter to the journal's (and Elsevier's) pledge of equality and inclusivity," the editors wrote. The breaking point seems 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-editor model that has been in place since 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor protested, they were told the model could only remain if they took a 50 percent cut in their compensation.
Dupe from Dec. 28 (Score:5, Insightful)
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But this is a mutated version. Slashdot is one big genetic algorithm.
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This was already posted two days ago: Journal's Editors Resign Over Elsevier Meddling, Budget Cuts, and Errors Introduced by AI [slashdot.org]
Rated Insightful? What, both the editors AND readers were clueless about the dupe problem? Really?
Heres an insightful thought. Make more fucking tags. It ain’t 1997 anymore.
And don’t mod this into negative oblivion because you’re offended by change. Change is like Shit. It Happens whether you like it or not.
Re: Dupe from Dec. 28 (Score:2)
"Change is like Shit. It Happens whether you like it or not."
The owners are currently focused on shitty changes like adding the post delay to mobile, and getting ads through our ad blockers. That saying is doubly true here and now.
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Are they the things I see at the end of each line of "firehose"? "Einstein face" ; "blue and yellow worms" ; "HP logo", "ripped up green cross" ? That sort of thing. All thoroughly uninformative compared to (this is difficult - it involves words ; though I understand that l33t-d00dz are trying to remove words from the language these decades) reading the headline, then maybe TFS.
Paradoxically (Score:2)
Evolution Journal Editors Resign En Masse
Rather than slowly, over time.
Re:Paradoxically (Score:5, Funny)
Editors: "We object to cutting staff and replacing people with AI, so we resign!"
Owners: "Great!"
Re:Paradoxically (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but if you're about to get dumped anyway, this is likely your best option for fucking over the people doing it - by trashing the reputation of the place while preserving your own.
AI is not ready to do their jobs, so quality will suffer. The goal is to remove human staffing costs while maintaining income... this move reduces the odds of maintaining that income.
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Owner, "We will be replacing all executives with AI."
CEO, "Shit..."
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That said, an opportunity for new journals that pledge to never use AI technology clearly exists now too. Science is too valuable to mess it up with AI shenanigans. Personally, I would go so far as to require paper authors to certify that their paper doesn't use AI models during the research as a condition of acceptance. But then, again I have fairly high standards I guess.
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Accurate science journaling over corporate profits? It's a wonderful goal, yet Elsevier obviously values profits over accuracy. Perhaps Open Science Journals (many examples) might save the day.
The problems are huge, however. The cost of peer review, the labors of accurate editing, and the publishing mechanisms are very real. Open platforms like wikis are plainly useful, if contentious because they have the messiness of varying degrees of open editing. The problems with open editing is that it's not peer-bas
Re: Paradoxically (Score:1)
Naw man. They winked into existence in a resigned state.
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Only one didn't resign. They are now a highly advanced editor.
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The editor who did not resign was the AI.
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Rather than slowly, over time.
Catastrophism wins over gradualism model.
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Punctuated equilibrium, baby.
Who remains? (Score:2)
And are the remaining editors different from the departed ones, in some way that will help them stay on-board going forward?
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Who remains?
According to TFA, one editor is staying.
And are the remaining editors different from the departed ones?
The one who remains has a less fervent objection to outsourcing and AI.
Re: Who remains? (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see articles now presenting creationism and black magic.
Editors resigning you say? (Score:3, Funny)
So when are the Slashdot editors - who do none of that - being replaced?
Fork ! (Score:3)
Consider a few examples of successful forks:
The scholarly publishing ecosystem runs largely on unpaid academic labour. Give that, I wonder if a university press or three should pick up the task of publishing academic journals, and incidentally using some of those profits to improve the jour
paleoanthropological (Score:1)
Say that three times real fast.
When the author pays the publisher you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that the journal isn't really about advancing science.
What's really happening is that post-grad students must have a publication record to buff their CV, and the journal owners are selling the necessary citations.
The journal system is broken, and the existence of this business model is merely a symptom.
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When you get your work published somewhere, you "enter the literature".
A "citation" is when some other author cites your work in their later work which either depends on it, or at least mentions it has having been a significant contributor. (Something like a method of sprocket-flanging might deserve a citation, without your work actually depending on it, because there are other ways to achieve the same end than flanging a sprocket.)
It it perfectly reasonable for
Re: (Score:2)
Do they share management with Slashdot? (Score:2)
When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting."
What's left for an editor to do if they aren't supposed to do any of the things editors are meant to do? Is their job just to stamp approve on every paper as it hits their desk? WTF? Do they share management with Slashdot? Seems like they have the same stance on editing.
Signed-off-by: (Score:2)
Journals are obsolete, relics of the pre-Internet age.
Extend git to handle whatever papers need.
Peer-review has morphed into mini-editor censorship and good papers from the Arxives aren't making it to publication when they threaten a "peer's" hypothesis.
And all the taxpayer-funded research must be open access.
Here this journal is admitting that it can't operate properly.
they'll probably start their own journal (Score:2)