Journal editors’ mass resignation marks ‘sad day for paleoanthropology’ | Science | AAAS

"Last month, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), one of the premier journals covering paleoanthropology, resigned en masse in a dispute with its publisher, the for-profit behemoth Elsevier. Their objections included a lack of adequate copy editing support and open-access fees too high for many authors to afford. The resigning editors, who included the editors-in-chief, also asserted Elsevier had incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) in its production schemes, resulting in scientifically significant errors—a claim the publisher denies.

Elsevier has since replaced the editors-in-chief, but several authors who have published in JHE say its future is murky. The former board’s collective knowledge is what attracted researchers to the journal, says Carol Ward, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Missouri who, like many regular authors, previously served on the board. Without that brand of expertise, she predicts she and other paleoanthropologists will look to publish elsewhere. “I think it’s a death blow,” she says. “It’s a sad day for paleoanthropology.”

The editors felt they had no other choice, says resigning co–Editor-in-Chief Andrea Taylor, a paleoanthropologist at Touro University California. “It was not what we had hoped for. [But] things reached a point where there was just no more alignment between the publisher and the journal.” ..."