Science Friday
Hosted by Ira Flatow
Publishers want to put out more papers with less editorial staff, all while charging scientists more to publish. Editors have had enough.
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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman.
And I'm Ira Flatow. Scientific journal editors are resigning in droves. So what's going on?
It really was a matter of ethics and conscience.
According to Retraction Watch, a watchdog publication, there have been at least 20 mass resignations since 2023. So what's going on here? Well, if you look closely, you'll notice a common pattern. Publishers are cutting back on the number of editors, shortening publishing deadlines, charging hefty fees for authors to publish their work. The most recent resignation happened at the Journal of Human Evolution at the end of last year. Both co-editors in chief and the entire editorial board quit, except for one person. But what does this mean for the future of scientific publishing? Have these resignations made the big publishers change their ways? Is this
Strict academic publishing system we know in danger. Well, joining me now to answer these questions are my guests, Dr. Andrea Taylor, former co-editor in chief of the journal Human Evolution and biological anthropologist and professor of anatomy in Vallejo, California, and Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, editor in chief of The Transmitter and distinguished journalist in residence at New York University's Carter Journalism Institute, based in New York. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Good to be here. Thank you.
Great to be here. Thanks, Ira.
Ivan, did I get all of that right, those resignations?
You did. And I should be clear that there may have even been more resignations than that. We don't claim to necessarily have all of them cataloged, although we think we've probably at least captured most of them. They have been happening, at least we've seen them happening, more often over the past couple of years. Whether that reflects them actually happening more, or us just noticing, or other people noticing them, because we're not the only ones to report on this, is unclear.
Okay, before we dig more deeply into the current state of the scientific publishing industry, I always like to follow the money all the time. Can you give us a brief overview of the business model of scientific journals? I know it's a, what, $19 billion industry with a 40% profit margin. That's pretty healthy, isn't it? I'm not sure most listeners know how much unpaid volunteer labor is also used to prop it up.
Yeah, so, you know, at a high level, there are a couple of different, or several different ways that publishers make money. And I'm going to miss some here intentionally, but just to bucket them, there's the old fashioned way, which of course, we're all familiar with, subscriptions. And those tend to come in various forms, and you might buy, you know, a library, for example, might buy dozens, or even hundreds, or maybe even thousands of journals subscriptions for their university, for example. That is, you know, in many ways being phased out in favor of what's known as an article processing charge model. Some people talk about sort of an author pays model where In order to make an article not need a subscription, in other words, open access,
the authors actually pay, and that can be anywhere from ninety-nine dollars to twelve or thirteen thousand dollars per article, in order that anyone, including you, me, and any scientist in the world, can read it for free. Now, that, to sort of jump ahead a little bit, that has led to massive growth in publications, although that was sort of happening anyway. And it's led to what we're concerned about, a sort of really bad incentive to just publish more and more and more. Well, guess what? Publishing more and more and more makes doing the quality checks, you know, the peer review, which is the sort of technical term for it in science and scientific publishing. It makes that much, much more challenging because you're jamming many, many more papers through an already taxed system.
And so what you're seeing with some of these resignations, and in fact, a lot of them, is a real concern that, both in terms of equity, in terms of who can afford these charges, and also just in terms of what this means for quality, that editors are saying, you know, as in the old movie, right, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.
Yeah, yeah. Andrea, is that what motivated you and the rest of the editorial board to resign from the Journal of Human Evolution?
Yeah, I think that Ivan hit it the nail on the head, if you will. Uh, it's the incentive to publish more papers quickly, and that certainly taxes the system and our concern about quality. You know, quality and integrity are the things that we focus on, and that's not necessarily in sync with the priorities of faster and more.
Mm-hmm. And to get this collective action, to have so many editors resign together, did you really need to convince them all to get on board, or were they ready to go also?
I think it's important to, to be clear that this was a profoundly personal decision for every single editorial board member. There was no pressure by anyone for any of members of the editorial board to, to resign.
I can say it was not only deeply personal, but it was an extremely difficult and painful decision to arrive at. It's not the decision we were hoping for.
And in the public resignation letter, which you and the other editors wrote about your concerns with the use of AI in the editorial process. I mean Elsevier, who publishes The Journal of Human Evolution, denies using AI. And you said they were. Can you tell me more about what those concerns were?
Since that letter came out, there's certainly been a lot of attention focused on the use of AI. And obviously, we could have an entire show, entire conversation here on simply the use of AI in academia and education and publishing and so on. We appreciate Elsevier's response, and we agree that the extraordinary production issues that we were experiencing in mid-October of 2023, those did resolve within a six-month period. And that's certainly consistent with the statement we issued, that the editorial board issued. We don't know what to make of the statement that AI was never used in production. During a virtual meeting with Elsevier that took place in the fall of
2023, the then joint editor-in-chief that was working with me at the time, and we were both in the same meeting, and we were informed that the extraordinary production issues that we were experiencing at that time were somehow related to an AI software that Elsevier was trying to train. Could we have been misinformed? Yes. Could there have been the use of AI that was subsequently suspended? Yes. Do we have any reason to question the veracity of what we heard in that meeting? We didn't. So, you know, all that being said, from
our point of view, whatever the cause, the net effect was a new low in terms of production quality for a period of six months. And I think the more important question here is how is it possible that papers that were properly formatted and proofread and so on, when they were accepted, how is it possible that there's no one overseeing that quality before it reaches the author?
Right, right. So what's at stake here in terms of the quality of the scientific research being published if these trends to cut corners continue to accelerate? Ivan, you want to take that first?
You know, I think we're already seeing the consequences. We have been now for some years. Adam Marcus and I have only been doing retraction watch since 2010, although sometimes it feels like longer. And, you know, even in that what's actually relatively short period of time, I think, we've seen already an explosion in the number of retractions. And those are only the ones that are being caught. In other words, there are lots of other papers that clearly should be retracted. And so I would argue that the overall quality of the scientific literature, at least percentage-wise, is declining and has been declining. And you can just sort of track it with the volume and just the number of, again, retractions, corrections, other things that should be corrected or retracted. And I think, you
know, I'm even more concerned about the reputation hit that publishers and scientists and science and universities and funders are taking because it's never quite clear if what you're looking at is, has actually been checked. Has it been, again, peer reviewed? And if it has been peer reviewed, has it been peer reviewed in a reasonable way? Was it done partly by AI? That's a symptom, I think, to the earlier comments, to the point of the earlier comments at Andrew's making. That's a symptom of the need for volume. And so I just think that if we want to, you know, trust what we read in journals, not as the absolute truth, not
as the absolute, this is, this must be correct, but as someone has actually looked at this and told us whether or not, you know, it's likely to hold up or something, some sort of version of that, then we need to be honest about the real strain on the system and whether or not publishing as is now practiced, and science even as is now practiced, because publishing is such an important part of it, is really sort of living up to the ideals, the very, I think, important, critical and lofty ideals that we all want it to. And right now, I guess I unfortunately have to say, I'm not sure it is.
I wanted to clarify something that was said. I want to be crystal clear that the Journal of Human Evolution is a rigorously peer-reviewed journal.
And all of the papers that are submitted, those papers are rigorously peer reviewed in a system in which the editors and associate editors are overseeing that process. So there's never, ever been a question of AI being used in any aspect of peer review, acceptance, and so on.
So your, your letter outlines other problems which are changes to how the associate editors are hired, the elimination of a copy editor back in 2019. Not the peer review process itself, but just the, the machinations of having the process going ahead. You know?
You know, that goes back to death by a thousand cuts. You know, here is the loss of a special issues editor. That means the editors that are handling the regular issue papers are now taking on these thematic issues. The loss of a copy editor, that means that, you know, one of the main goals of Journal of Human Evolution, you know, it's an international journal and the journal receives papers from all over the world. And a copy editor is crucial if we want to aim to reach as wide a readership as possible. We want those papers to be understandable and as accessible as possible.
We have to take a quick break, but don't go away. More on this when we come back.
It's ammunition for people who may have their own reasons for denigrating science, denigrating the scientific establishment or expertise.
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Do you think that, you know, we're in an era of there are people who want to denigrate science and not trust in science? Do you think this gives them fuel for them saying, hey, you see, even the, even the science editors themselves are resigning?
Absolutely. I mean, and Adam and I have been aware of this, again, for something like fifteen years, because early on, some groups that, I don't want to say they're denigrating science necessarily, I don't want to, I don't know what their actual motivations are, but they were pushing sort of, you know, intelligent design, which is this idea that is very related to, at the very least, sort of creationism. And it's a, it's not a particularly evidence-based idea. I'll get yelled at for saying that, but I get yelled at every day, so I'm good with it. And what we noticed is that they were pointing to our work and saying, oh, see, these guys are pointing out peer review isn't all it's cracked up to be. And there's retractions, and there's fraud, and there's all sorts of things. And this is at a time when there weren't nearly as many as there are now. So we were very well aware of how
all of this can be weaponized. It's ammunition for people who may have their own reasons, may have their own motivations, for, again, as you put it, denigrating science, denigrating the scientific establishment or expertise. I will say, though, that most people who we talk to, anyway, who are questioning what they see in journals, are either themselves scientists, or are fervent sort of advocates for science and the scientific process, even more importantly. And so I think that, you know, the call's coming from inside the house sometimes, and we need to actually listen to it. You know, you're not going to fix the system from the outside, but you may be forced to have to fix the system from the outside if everyone doesn't pay attention to these problems, which are based on incentives.
Well, okay, now that you've had this mass resignation of your editorial board, has it made a dent in the publisher, Elsevier, rethinking their practices?
So that's a great question. I think in most cases, the impetus for these resignations wasn't simply, or only, or even, right, to make a point to the publisher. I'd love to say the publishers are listening, but I think the reality is, is that, that they probably aren't. But in our case, it really was a matter of ethics and conscience. It wasn't a matter of expecting that the publisher was going to change.
Right, it wasn't a lever you were trying to use.
No.
No. And Ivan, is there any evidence that these big publishers like Elsevier or Springer Nature are paying attention to these mass resignations?
So they're definitely paying attention. And one thing to note is that although Elsevier has been publicly traded for a long time, Springer Nature, which is another massive publisher, they just had an initial public offering, an IPO, last fall. And it was kind of their third time around. They've been trying it before. But the reason I mention that is that if you read their initial prospectus and then now they've had one quarterly earnings call, they're clearly signaling to the market that they can suffer reputation damage in any number of ways. I don't think they called out resignations specifically, but to me, that's in keeping with other things they mentioned, like retractions, the use of what are known as paper mills to sort of muck up the process and to create real problematic papers that end up getting
published anyway, all this sorts of stuff that really does hit them where they live. You know, Wiley, which is another big publisher, their stock price went down 16% when they announced essentially a cascading set of events that involved some really, you know, a large number of retractions and what have you. And so I think there are other levers. I think to the question and to Andrew's point, it's unclear what effect any particular one will have, but we know they're paying attention. And a lot of these editors have gone off to other publishers, often nonprofits where they do it themselves. And that's an interesting experiment. Too soon to tell how successful that'll be. But, you know, does that do something to change the ecosystem one drop at a time?
Andrea, any idea? Any thoughts of going off independently?
We've had this question before and the answer's been we're having conversations about having conversations.
And Ivan, I mean, we've seen some of these nonprofits popping up in recent years. I'm thinking specifically like Plus One, right? Has that not been successful?
Plus one, you know, obviously, successful is in the eye of the beholders, but it's certainly grown, but then it has shrunk a bit in terms of volume of papers. They, like every nonprofit and even like every for-profit company, go through not boom and bust necessarily, but sort of ups and downs. That's a major one that is sort of particularly focused, but there's also operations like MIT Press, obviously associated with MIT, and they've done some really interesting things in terms of this space and making everything open and not necessarily, for example, relying on article processing charges. So I think what we're seeing is a sort of set of experiments, some which will be successful, some won't, that have to do really with the business models, but also with the mission
of what publishers are meant to do and what we hope they will do. But it's too soon to tell. It makes a very interesting time for journalists like me, who focuses on these issues, but, you know, not sure what will happen yet.
Well, Andrea, good luck to you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Dr. Andrea Taylor, former co-editor in chief of the Journal of Human Evolution and biological anthropologist and professor of anatomy in Vallejo, California. Ivan Aransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, editor in chief of The Transmitter, distinguished journalist in residence, New York University's Carter Journalism Institute, based in New York City.
That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen. Jordan Smudjic.
Rasha Uryidi.
Charles Bergquist. Shoshana Buxbaum. I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.
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