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Elsevier’s response, they said, was “to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.”
Fucking hell, Elsevier, we all know you’re shitty people who are doing immense harm to the world for personal gain, but do you have to rub it in our faces every time? Can’t you at least like pretend?
If they think their editors should be ignoring all that, then what the fuck should they be doing?
They don’t think there should be editors around. You don’t have to pay AI except maybe a subscription fee.
I’m really asking myself here: what is Elsevier doing for a living?
Like, what value do they bring to the table at this point? Pushing submissions through a shitty chatgpt wrapper?
They’re making money for a living.
I don’t think “what value are we bringing to the academic publishing industry?” is something anybody there really considers. Well unless you define “value” as “shareholder profit”, at any rate.
Use of AI? In a peer-reviewed journal?
Is AI a peer now?
My guess is they want to use it to detect AI? That seems like the only use case for it.
Of course, followed by a human reviewing its findings.
From the article:
In-house production has been reduced or outsourced, and in 2023 Elsevier began using AI during production without informing the board, resulting in many style and formatting errors, as well as reversing versions of papers that had already been accepted and formatted by the editors. “This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors," the editors wrote. "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.”
It sure doesn’t sound like that’s what they want to use it for.
Elsevier
Was all I needed to read to understand what’s going on.
They just consistently manage to fall short of even the lowest expectations I set. It’s astonishing.
That’s a real mess they’ve made there. Personally a sad day as I peer-reviewed a paper for the JHE once.
At least it means that we are moving to more open journals and away from this weird exploitative model:
Nature published an article back in March raising questions about the efficacy of mass resignations as an emerging form of protest after all the editors of the Wiley-published linguistics journal Syntax resigned in February. (Several of their concerns mirror those of the JHE editorial board.) Such moves certainly garner attention, but even former Syntax editor Klaus Abels of University College London told Nature that the objective of such mass resignations should be on moving beyond mere protest, focusing instead on establishing new independent nonprofit journals for the academic community that are open access and have high academic standards.
Abels and his former Syntax colleagues are in the process of doing just that, following the example of the former editors of Critical Public Health and another Elsevier journal, NeuroImage, last year.
I wonder if there is a place for the Fediverse there, perhaps with each journal/publisher being an instance.
