Journal of Human Evolution: Resignation of the Editorial Board

"For over four decades, the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) has been the flagship journal in paleoanthropological and human evolution research. The longstanding success of JHE rests on the exemplary scholarship of its authors supported by extensive labor on the part of the Editorial board (EB). 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....

Over the past 10 years Elsevier made a number of changes that run counter to these successful principles and are harmful to JHE. These changes have increasingly placed Elsevier, not the EB, in control of scientific oversight of the journal and reduced production quality....

Over strong opposition of the editors, Elsevier has been relentlessly pursuing a restructuring of the EB. The goal to reduce the number of AEs to fewer than half the current number will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise. Mimicking structures found in many for-profit journals created in recent years, Elsevier further aims to create a third-tier editorial board that functions as ‘figure heads’ in name only without any access to submissions or reviews....

In parallel, the editors have been raising concerns for years about the cost of Open Access (OA) in JHE and the impact on submissions.1 Elsevier’s APC charges in JHE ($3990 excluding taxes on the JHE website) remain out of reach for much of our authorship, with Elsevier outsourcing its production process to low-quality companies while charging publication fees well in excess of discipline-comparable Elsevier-published journals (e.g., International Journal of Paleopathology: $1910; Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports: $2265; Palaeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology: $3110; Journal of Anthropological Archaeology: $3270;), compared with broad based open access journals such as Scientific Reports (IF: 3.8; APC:$2590), and compared with production costs for nonprofit publishers. Given these high charges, and the negligible number of Elsevier OA agreements, especially in the US, the net effect is that only a small portion of JHE authors can afford to make their science widely and publicly accessible, which runs counter to the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) pledge of equity and inclusivity...."