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The Journal of Human Evolution is published by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. All but one of the JHE editorial board resigned last week in the wake of Elsevier rewriting papers with LLMs — without telling either the editors or the authors: [Retraction Watch; Retraction Watch, PDF]
Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well as italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.
… AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.
Elsevier was also slow with open access and charged authors much more to publish in JHE — $3,990 per paper! — than its other journals. [JHE]
Finally, Elsevier demanded JHE reduce its number of editors — presumably thinking an LLM could do well enough. This was the last straw after ten years of Elsevier cutting services to the journal.
John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a frequent JHE contributor, supports the editors’ position: “if there was any notice to my coauthors or me about an AI production process, I don’t remember it.” He feels “the real lapse is a more basic matter of ethics.” [blog post]
Elsevier applies stringent policies on generative AI to its authors — but not to itself. [Elsevier]
