Journal editors resign to protest AI use, high fees, and more

Board members expressed concerns over high fees, editorial independence, and use of AI in editorial processes.

See full article...

 

[cgo_12345]

@heaARP Imagine creating an account just to shill for some sub-Time Cube tier crank. Don't insult everyone's intelligence like this.

 

[iquanyin]

Isn't that...the exact job of an editor?


Is there a way this ends that isn't just all the resigned people being replaced by AI and the quality of everything just getting worse?

it is. that and more. as a retired coo editor i can only laugh. and cry.

 

[graylshaped]

it is. that and more. as a retired coo editor i can only laugh. and cry.

 

[uesc_marathon]

Bravo to the editorial board for their brave stand against Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution! The journal concept is an old fashioned one, obsolete, corrupt and really just an "old boy's club". The journal mindset encourages mediocrity, and wants conformity to their own agenda. The journal heads are pirates, maximizing their own profits at the expense of quality and truth. And this comes at a cost to the tax payers whose hard earned money goes to university grants which then ends up in the pockets of the journal pirates! My husband, Dr. Gerald E. Aardsma (Ph.D Physics, University of Toronto, 1984) just read this article to me over dinner. The problems cited in the article are some of his hot buttons! He gave up going the journal route many years ago, after a few papers he wrote were published in Radiocarbon. He has been doing research for 50 years and has, except for a few instances, self-published his own papers on his own website. When he writes his papers he isn't thinking about how many people will cite him, how many papers does he need to publish per year to stay "in the game", how does he get past the peer reviewers who have their own agendas, etc. What he was and is trying to accomplish was to solve real world problems and help humanity, not build a career. Welcome to the modern world! One can publish their own work on their own websites, do it the way they want to, pay their own copy editors, and say the truth as they see it. Folks will find your work via google. Go for it!

If this is your husband, then I suspect there's real good reasons why he's not passing editorial review by people actually checking his process.
https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Flood-Happened-Gerald-Aardsma/dp/0964766574

 

[iquanyin]

Different classes of editors have different skill sets. The people in this article are technical editors, experts on the subjects covered by the articles. They can look at referee reports and make informed policy devisions about whether an article is appropriate or needs further revision or whatever. Doesn’t mean that they’re particularly good at going through each paragraph and making sure that the notation conforms to the house style guide and so forth. Copy editing is its own very specific skill set.

Elsevier is right in saying that the technical editorial board shouldn’t be doing that stuff. They’re wrong in trying to save money by handing the job over to some random AI implementation.

bingo. i’ve seen this all over the web, btw, the obvious (to me, who made my living copy editing science and social science books) ditching of copy editors. what floors me tho, is seeing it in here as well as in blogs and news outlets. i guess i shouldn’t be quite that surprised, tho. money is money, and people everywhere love shiny new toys.

 

[uesc_marathon]

Well, I'd rather rendition the Congress critters/Senate that jumped on the deregulation bandwagon that's been going on for the last 40 some odd years that has ended up giving us HMOs, (increased profits for health care), corporate raiders, (Icahn, Pickens, Milken, etc), the S&L crisis, WorldCom, Enron, the subprime crisis of 2008 and so on. Now, among many issues, VCs have been buying consumer real estate and artificially restricting the available housing and rental stock on the market...

I blame all the above, (and there's more, I have a long memory), on the shit show that is our poor market regulation, (stock buybacks? Blatant market manipulation is a okay). That sits squarely on the shoulders of our Congress and Senate. Next up would be the executives that bought them or possibly the Supreme Court that has allowed it, (whose members are, of course, decided by the Senate).

It's the voters.
None of this would happen if american voters weren't petty, small, mean, xenophobic, eager to believe nonsense, suspicious of reality, and ready to be willingly taken for a ride as long as someone they don't like gets hurt.
In a democracy, the government represents the will of the people.
It's taken me my entire life but after 2024 it is no longer possible to avoid the truth. The reason the US is the way it is, is because US voters want it this way.

 

[osgat]

This is a good opportunity to reiterate that the practice of delegating the role of certifying science to for-profit organization is a travesty. Not only are the egregious profits a huge parasitic drain from the resources dedicated to research, there is a built-in conflict of interest, which causes journals to prefer visibility and 'impact' over true breakthroughs. It's one of the main drivers behind the diminishing returns plaguing science in the last decades

 

[TheGnome]

I think that will create a number of bad models, but the main one is the burden it puts on those who want to know about the research. Imagine instead of reading a few journals in e.g. computer science, you have to read 250 and separate the wheat from the chaff while doing it.

In my experience very few researchers have the time to browse journals anymore; we find relevant papers by searching PubMed or other search engines that find everything with relevant keywords that's indexed. So it wouldn't be a problem if a university published all the successfully peer-reviewed research generated by it's faculty under a single publication, even though that would obviously be a massive hodgepodge of topics. But I agree, it would be nice to have everything sub-categorized by topics; I suggest academic societies run indexing services such that all papers on a given subject from all the university publishers are easily browsable (the BioRxiv preprint server already does this).

Alternatively, someone suggested that the funding agencies act as the publishers; I like this idea as well. I have always agreed that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, and having NIH/NSF/NSERC/CIHR/SSHRC etc. serving as the repositories of the academic research they've funded makes a lot of sense. My suggestion of having universities play this role was based on the idea that universities often compete for 'bragging rights' regarding the value/impact of the research done under their auspices, and having universities serve as the repositories of their own research would facilitate that.

Either way, the important thing is getting the for-profit parasitic publishers out of the business of disseminating scientific research.

 

[JohnDeL]

The one topic that AI could have been useful for was screening submissions to see if they were purely someone's doctoral dissertation (I hated those, and the ones that got through had very poor ratings in the journal, not because the science was bad, but my god I've read IRS form instructions that were more interesting). Dissertations aren't written to actually be read, but just to demonstrate mastery of a subject. Journal articles are trying to disseminate knowledge, not prove the author is smart...

Huh. For both my thesis and dissertation (different universities), the expectation was that you'd publish the work in a journal first, then find a way to weave the articles together as a unified whole. That way we got experience in the rough-and-tumble field of academic publishing and the thesis/dissertation committees got something that they knew was at least nominally acceptable.

 

[JohnDeL]

If this is your husband, then I suspect there's real good reasons why he's not passing editorial review by people actually checking his process.
https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Flood-Happened-Gerald-Aardsma/dp/0964766574

You need go no further than the first clause of his bio to know why the work is so egregiously awful: "Dr. Gerald Aardsma is a nuclear physicist"

Obligatory XKC
https://xkcd.com/793/

 

[cgo_12345]

@davidsco27 They contribute more than you ever have. Calm down.

 

[graylshaped]

I'm sure you'll find an even BIGGER loser than you who's interested in your opinions

I did. He is following me from thread to thread.

 

[Ananisapta]

There is no "artificial intelligence". Anybody who's ever played a complex computer game knows that.

 

[rochefort]

I can't speak for the rest of the government, but when NIH pays for medical studies, the peer-reviewed research must be submitted to PubMed Central where it is publicly available for anyone to access.

https://sharing.nih.gov/public-access-policy

I believe it's the authors' manuscript that has to be submitted, not the published version that's peer-reviewed and edited.

 

[theelephantintheroom]

Been boycotting Elsevier for 7 years now. For anyone who's not familiar with their scope of work, there's plenty to read online that would keep you busy for weeks. This comes as no shock at all. They never pretended they want the good of science, only their profits, even if thatś at the detriment of knowledge and their own products.

 

[littlesmith]

AI is so useless. When used like Elsevier did in the article, the result has to be proof-read with so much effort that in the end there is no productivity increase if one wants to keep quality.
Also for the AI-System to detect false images: If the system is only able to detect very simple kinds of forgery, then where is the benefit? I guess in scientific papers the quality of a forgery is generally quite high, if it occurs. This means, that the amount of filtered images would be quite small. And even those images would need to be double checked by humans, as AI-system tend to produce false positives. In the end the AI-system is pure waste of computing time and energy.
We saw it already with blockchains, that a hyped type of technology is thrown blindly at anything whether it makes sense or not. The same happens now with so called AI.

 

[gregorerlich]

Quality journals on any topic are by their nature expensive to produce.

Elsevier are presumably trying to balance quality/cost/profit (Likely with a focus on profit).

Quality appears to be the loser. Again.

You are extremely misinformed.

The journal costs very little to produce. The science is expensive, but that's paid for by grants etc. Peer review would be expensive, but that's handled by volunteers. Layout can be expensive, but generally/often it's either done by templates or even by the authors themselves. Authors don't get paid, in fact, they pay to submit!

There's actually very little the journal publisher actually does. Printing and mailing physical copies (if any), coordinating with peer reviewers, selecting articles from submissions, maybe some copy editing (but apparently that's optional). And for that minimal set of tasks, they charge a king's ransom to submit and subscribe. It's basically pure profit going and coming.

Fuck Elsevier in particular, and every for profit journal in general. They are parasites, plain and simple.

 

[ferdnyc]

Fuck Elsevier in particular, and every for profit journal in general. They are parasites, plain and simple.

They (meaning, their ilk, not Elsevier exclusively — but most certainly, Elsevier among the culprits) certainly do seem to be on the front lines of perverting the academic ideal of published research that's intended to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge, for the benefit of all.

There's absolutely plenty of room for "nothing wrong with making a buck for myself, too, while I contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge" — heck, that's why many companies and institutions fund research in the first place. Nobody's saying that academia requires poverty from all participants.

But there's a big difference between somebody's side-hustle selling framed posters of interesting figures or images from published research papers, and companies like Elsevier that set themselves up to profit off of the process of releasing the research itself — and in a way that leads all too easily to gatekeeping on their part.

 

[MarkR_]

Depends on the journal. I was an AE for an Elsevier journal for a few years, quit about 5 years ago for basically related reasons to these folks… we got some pittance of pay for our work. At first it was a reasonable amount but then they wanted us to basically stop desk rejecting bad papers. This was at a time when there was a huge flood of papers from China and the signal to noise of these was terrible. (It has since improved due to changes in how China incentivizes research… different story). Anyway this flood of bad papers, we couldn’t mitigate it, had to try to find reviewers for them, which meant reaching out to a dozen or more people before we could get 2 for most of these. Because it’s clear from the abstract included with the review request that it’s bad. I got tired of this real quick. I also got tired of being told by reviewers “this is a bad paper why did you waste my time instead of desk rejecting it.” And so I quit.

But yeah it might save them a little money.

Thanks for sharing.

I noticed a flood of review requests for poor-quality papers, especially coming from China. The ones with publishable scientific work often needed a lot of review effort to fit with journal style & rigour requirements. I then heard from editors that the same group of authors had a high fraction of people who would refuse to do reviews, and a good fraction of those that woud, could not provide reviews of the expected standard.

 

[davidsco27]

I did. He is following me from thread to thread.

your mom is following you?

 

[davidsco27]

@davidsco27 They contribute more than you ever have. Calm down.

ok, mom