Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board (full text)

by Mark Grabowski

Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board: We are saddened to announce the resignations of The Joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor. Press release below

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. While the EB has accommodated the reduction of services to the journal since the early 2000s, the pace has accelerated over the last 10 years to a point that is no longer tenable. Journal history: Journal of Human Evolution, founded in 1972, was reorganized in 1986 to provide greater scholarly attention to and control of the review, revision, and publication of research in the journal. Recognizing that research in human evolution represents a globally diverse community of scholars, two editors-in-chief from different countries took the helm, a structure that has been in place ever since. These editor-scholars purposefully established a working EB of Associate Editors—not an 'editorial board' in name only, without editorial oversight as had led to the initial foundering of JHE—but a group of active scholars expertly capable of handling submissions covering a wide range of topics in a field that is highly interdisciplinary and demands a mix of both broad and fine-scaled expertise. Thirty eight years later, JHE has an impact factor of 3.1 and Scopus cite score of 6.3, both the highest in the field, and has maintained an acceptance rate of —50%; excellence that results from a set of sustained core principles. JHE's core principles: Since 1986, JHE has been guided by this set of core principles and structures: 1) the journal is overseen by two editors-in-chief who are committed to journal quality and integrity; 2) the editors select and invite AEs to serve on the EB and in the numbers and expertise they deem necessary to support the scope of submissions; 3) in consultation with the AEs, the editors set the standards for manuscript review; 4) the EB places a premium on the quality of the science and published product over quantity, speed, or profit margins; and 5) the EB is committed to helping authors, especially early career scholars and non-native English speaking scholars, publish their best papers. JHE has flourished for decades under this model. JHE papers are built to last. Harmful changes to the journal's principles and structures: 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. Elsevier eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor. Elsevier's response to our repeated concerns about the need for a copy editor has been to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting. This advice runs counter to the journal's longstanding emphasis on making every paper as widely accessible and citable as possible, and is especially important for a journal like JHE, which publishes papers dealing with topics that follow international codes such as systematics, stratigraphy, geology, geochronology, and so forth. Elsevier does not attend to this and frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript.

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 filnctions as 'figure heads' in name only without any access to submissions or reviews. In 2023, Elsevier unilaterally took full control over the JHE EB scientific structure and composition through their requirement that all JHE AEs be recontracted annually. This action runs counter to their assurances that AE contracts would not undermine our longstanding principle of exercising editorial control of all scholarly decisions, including recruitment and retention of the expertise necessary to oversee the review process. Elsevier's control of the process has already resulted in reduction of the EB through non-issuance of contracts and attendant lack of access to the paper management syste