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Members of the Journal of Human Evolution editorial board have resigned en masse in opposition to alleged changes by the publisher, Elsevier, according to a public joint resignation letter.
“For over four decades, the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) has been the flagship journal in paleoanthropological and human evolution research,” the letter says. It goes on to say Elsevier, a massive publishing company, “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.”
The public letter—which the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s J. Michael Plavcan, a resigned editor emeritus, provided to Inside Higher Ed upon request—says it’s from the joint editors in chief, all editors emeriti and all but one associate editor.
The public version of the letter is unsigned. But another version, provided by resigned editor emeritus David R. Begun of the University of Toronto, contains 32 signatures. The resignations were effective Dec. 31.
“We sincerely thank the outgoing editors, the majority of whom were coming to the end of their term at the end of 2024, for their invaluable contributions and dedication to the journal,” an Elsevier spokesperson said. “We will continue to build on their important work in maintaining the high quality expected of the journal with the new editorial team.”
The public letter says Elsevier has “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” begun using artificial intelligence and now “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript.” The letter criticizes the company for nonetheless charging a nearly $4,000 article processing fee. Elsevier has also been seeking to cut the number of associate editors by more than half, “aims to create a third-tier editorial board that functions as ‘figure heads’ in name only” and, in November, said “it would no longer support the dual-editor model,” the letter says.
“When the editors vehemently opposed this action, Elsevier said it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half,” the letter says.
The Elsevier spokesperson said that the editors’ statement regarding use of artificial intelligence was incorrect.
“We do not use AI in our production processes,” the spokesperson said. “The journal trialled a production workflow that inadvertently introduced the formatting errors to which the editors refer. We had already acted on their feedback and reverted to the journal's previous workflow earlier in 2024.”
The letter was previously reported by Retraction Watch.
