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an emerging type of demonstration?
Board members revealed issues over high costs, editorial self-reliance, and usage of AI in editorial procedures.
Over the vacation weekend, all however 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 supplied an online PDF of the editors’ complete declaration. It’s the 20th mass resignation from a science journal because 2023 over numerous points of contention, per Retraction Watch, lots of in reaction to questionable modifications in business designs utilized by the clinical publishing market.
“This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us,” the board members composed in their declaration. “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 pointed out numerous modifications made over the last 10 years that it thinks are counter to the journal’s longstanding editorial concepts. These consisted of removing assistance for a copy editor and an unique concerns editor, leaving it to the editorial board to deal with those tasks. When the board revealed the requirement for a copy editor, Elsevier’s action, they stated, 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 likewise a significant restructuring of the editorial board underway that intends to decrease the variety of associate editors by over half, which “will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise.”
There are strategies to develop a third-tier editorial board that works mostly in a token capability, after Elsevier “unilaterally took full control” of the board’s structure in 2023 by needing all associate editors to restore their agreements yearly– which the board thinks weakens its editorial self-reliance and stability.
Worst practices
Internal production has actually been decreased or contracted out, and in 2023 Elsevier started utilizing AI throughout production without notifying the board, leading to lots of design and format mistakes, in addition to reversing variations of documents that had actually currently been accepted and formatted by the editors. “This was extremely awkward for the journal and resolution took 6 months and was attained just through the relentless efforts of the editors,” the editors wrote. “AI processing continues to be utilized and routinely reformats sent manuscripts to alter significance and format and need substantial author and editor oversight throughout evidence phase.”
In addition, the author page charges for JHE are considerably greater than even Elsevier’s other for-profit journals, along with broad-based open gain access to journals like Scientific Reports. Few of the journal’s authors can manage those charges, “which runs counter to the journal’s (and Elsevier’s) pledge of equality and inclusivity,” the editors composed.
The snapping point appears to have actually been available in November, when Elsevier notified 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 design that has actually remained in location given that 1986. When Grabowki and Taylor opposed, they were informed the design might just stay if they took a 50 percent cut in their settlement.
Elsevier has long had its share of singing critics (including our own Chris Lee) and this newest advancement has actually included fuel to the fire. “Elsevier has, as usual, mismanaged the journal and done everything they could to maximize profit at the expense of quality,” biologist PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota Morris composed on his blog site Pharyngula. “In particular, they decided that human editors were too expensive, so they’re trying to do the job with AI. They also proposed cutting the pay for the editor-in-chief in half. Keep in mind that Elsevier charges authors a $3990 processing fee for each submission. I guess they needed to improve the economics of their piratical mode of operation a little more.”
Elsevier has not yet reacted to Ars’ ask for remark; we will upgrade appropriately must a declaration be released.
Not all AI usages are produced equivalent
John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has actually released 17 documents in JHE over his profession, revealed his complete assistance for the board members’ choice on his blog site, in addition to shock at the (footnoted) discovery that Elsevier had actually presented AI to its editorial procedure in 2023. “I’ve published four articles in the journal during the last two years, including one in press now, and if there was any notice to my co-authors or me about an AI production process, I don’t remember it,” he composed, keeping in mind that the relocation breaks the journal’s own AI policies. “Authors should be informed at the time of submission how AI will be used in their work. I would have submitted elsewhere if I was aware that AI would potentially be altering the meaning of the articles.”
There is definitely trigger for issue when it concerns utilizing AI in the pursuit of science. Previously this year, we saw the viral experience of a number of egregiously bad AI-generated figures released in a peer-reviewed short article in Frontiers, a respectable clinical journal. Researchers on social networks revealed equivalent parts shock and ridicule at the images, among which included a rat with grotesquely big and strange genital areas. The paper has actually considering that been withdrawed, however the event enhances a growing issue that AI will make released clinical research study less reliable, even as it increases efficiency.
That stated, there are likewise some beneficial applications of AI in the clinical undertaking. Back in January, the research study publisher Science revealed that all of its journals would start utilizing business software application that automates the procedure of finding incorrectly controlled images. Maybe that would have captured the outright rat genitalia figure, although as Ars Science Editor John Timmer explained at the time, the software application has constraints. “While it will catch some of the most egregious cases of image manipulation, enterprising fraudsters can easily avoid being caught if they know how the software operates,” he composed.
Hawks acknowledged on his blog site that making use of AI by researchers and clinical journals is most likely inescapable and even acknowledges the possible advantages. “I don’t think this is a dystopian future. But not all uses of machine learning are equal,” he composed. To wit:
[I]t’s bad for anybody to utilize AI to minimize or change the clinical input and oversight of individuals in research study– whether that input originates from scientists, editors, customers, or readers. It’s silly for a business to utilize AI to divert specialists’ effort into redundant rounds of checking, or to make sharing clinical work harder.
In this case, Elsevier might have been going for great however rather struck the exacta of bad and foolish. It’s specifically galling that they require openness from authors however do not offer openness about their own procedures … [I]t would be a great concept for authors of current posts to ensure that they have actually published a preprint someplace, so that their initial pre-AI variation will be readily available for readers. As the editors lose gain access to, corrections to released short articles might end up being tough or difficult.
Nature released a post back in March raising concerns about the effectiveness of mass resignations as an emerging kind of demonstration after all the editors of the Wiley-published linguistics journal Syntax resigned in February. (Several of their issues mirror those of the JHE editorial board.) Such relocations definitely gather attention, however even previous Syntax editor Klaus Abels of University College London informed Nature that the goal of such mass resignations must be on moving beyond simple demonstration, focusing rather on developing brand-new independent not-for-profit journals for the scholastic neighborhood that are open gain access to and have high scholastic requirements.
Abels and his previous Syntax associates remain in the procedure of doing simply that, following the example of the previous editors of Critical Public Health and another Elsevier journal, NeuroImage, in 2015.
Jennifer is a senior press reporter at Ars Technica with a specific concentrate on where science satisfies culture, covering whatever from physics and associated interdisciplinary subjects to her preferred movies and television series. Jennifer resides in Baltimore with her partner, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their 2 felines, Ariel and Caliban.
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