"The Impact of Mass Resignations by Journal Editors"

A new wave of collective resignations is sweeping through the academic world, as journal editors are increasingly stepping down from their posts en masse. The latest incident occurred earlier this month when the editors of Syntax, a linguistics journal published by Wiley, resigned in response to changes in the manuscript-handling process that they felt would compromise the quality of the journal.

According to a tally by the website Retraction Watch, the Syntax editors' resignations were the fifth such event this year and the twelfth since 2021. The wave of resignations appears to be a response to changes in the business models of academic publishers, with many editors objecting to the article-processing-charge model, in which authors are charged fees to publish their papers open access.

The resignations are not just a form of protest, but also an attempt by editors to take control of the scholarly communication process. In some cases, groups of editors who resign go on to found new publications over which they have more control. For example, the former editors of Critical Public Health, who resigned last year in protest against the publisher's plans to make the journal open access, are in the process of setting up a new journal called The Journal of Critical Public Health.

Similarly, the former editors of Elsevier journal NeuroImage, who resigned last year, have set up another journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT press. Stephen Smith, a biomedical engineer at the University of Oxford, was editor-in-chief of NeuroImage and now holds the same role at the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, which launched in July 2023.

The resignations are a symptom of the tension between the competing priorities of publishers, who demand constant growth, and researchers, who value quality and depth. Many editors are taking matters into their own hands by founding new journals that are open, not-for-profit, and have high academic standards.

"The resignation is not so much the point. The point is creating an alternative top-quality channel of scholarly communication," says Klaus Abels, a linguistics researcher at University College London and one of the editors who resigned from Syntax.

While it is unclear whether mass resignations will become even more frequent, they are certainly getting a lot of attention. Michael Clarke, a publishing consultant at Clarke & Esposito in Washington DC, says that many mass resignations are in response to changes to business models in the publishing industry.

"If an academic community wishes to control the business decisions of a journal, the best way to do that is to own the journal," Clarke says.

Sources:

* Journal editors are resigning en masse: what do these group exits achieve? (nature.com)
* Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges (nature.com)
* Open-access row prompts editorial board of Elsevier journal to resign (nature.com)
* Retraction Watch (retractionwatch.com)

URL: <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00887-y>