Academic journal’s entire board resigns accusing Elsevier of “greed”
The entire board of the scientific journal Neuroimage resigned in protest against its publisher, Elsevier. According to the over 40 leading scientists, Elsevier charges researchers exorbitant fees to publish their research while also maintaining a massive profit margin. They will no longer accept this “greed” and are setting up their own non-profit, open-access journal, The Guardian reported.
The academic board of Neuroimage, the world’s leading publication for brain imaging research, included professors from Oxford University, King’s College London, and Cardiff University. Elsevier made Neuroimage “open access” so people can read the publications without going through a paywall. But it passes on lost income to academics, who now must pay over 3,000 euros to publish a paper.
According to the former editors, these charges are “unethical” and utterly disproportionate to the actual costs involved. “Elsevier preys on the academic community, claiming huge profits while adding little value to science,” said Professor Chris Chambers, head of brain stimulation at Cardiff University and one of the resigning board members. “All Elsevier cares about is money, and it will cost them a lot of money. They just got too greedy.”
Elsevier reported a revenue of 3.32 billion euros last year, up 10 percent from 2021. According to the company’s 2019 accounts, its profit margins are nearly 40 percent. And that while scientists themselves do everything they can to keep costs low, for example, peer reviewing each other’s work and academic editors collating it for free or for a small stipend.
“Academics really don’t like the way things are, but individuals feel powerless to get the huge publishers to start behaving more ethically,” Stephen Smit, professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford University and former chief editor of Neurimage, told The Guardian. According to him, researchers have put up with it in the past because publishing in prestigious journals helps their careers and gets them cited. But enough is enough, he said. “By taking the entire set of editors across to start the new journal, we are taking the reputation with us.”
A spokesperson for Elsevier told The Guardian that it was disappointed with the resignations “especially as we have been engaging constructively with them over the last couple of years.” He said Elsevier was “committed to advancing open-access research” and that it charged “below market average relative to quality” to publish scientific articles. “The fee of Neuroimage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field,” the spokesperson said.