On Monday, 17 April 2023, the entire editorial boards of two brain imaging journals, NeuroImage and its companion NeuroImage: Reports, resigned at once. Spectrum reported that their statement was signed by all 42 editorial board members, and that they planned a new nonprofit journal “to replace NeuroImage as the top journal in our field.”
The dispute was about money. At the time, Elsevier charged authors a $3,450 article processing charge (APC), the fee an author pays so that a paper is free for anyone to read, to publish in NeuroImage. Less than a month later, the MIT Press announced the editors’ new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with an initial fee of $1,600.
Elsevier kept NeuroImage going with an interim board. The editors walked out with something harder to name. My view is that a journal’s reputation is built mostly by the people who write, review and edit for it, and very little of it is in the logo. The title can be owned. The trust behind it has to keep being earned, and in this case the people who earned it left together.
A fee dispute that took almost a year
This was not a sudden tantrum. According to the editors’ statement, as reported by Spectrum, they asked Elsevier in June 2022 to lower the fee to $2,000 or less, and “no reduction was offered.” In March 2023 they said they would resign if the fee stood. In April, Elsevier told them it would not change. An Elsevier spokesperson confirmed that timeline.
NeuroImage had been around since 1992 and had switched to fully open access in 2020. Open access is a good goal. But when the reader no longer pays, the author does, and a fee of several thousand dollars decides who can afford to publish where.
When the refusal came, the editors left together. Their email, quoted by Inside Higher Ed, was short: “As you have confirmed that the APC will not be reduced, all editors from both journals are now resigning with immediate effect.”
Who actually does the work
Think about what happens to a paper at a journal like this. A scientist does the study and writes it up. An editor, usually a working academic, reads it and picks reviewers. Two or three other scientists review it, for free. The editor weighs their views and decides. The publisher then handles production, hosting and indexing.
The departing editors put the imbalance bluntly. Their announcement said “the publishers do not fund the original science, or the writing of articles or payments to reviewers and pay minimal editorial stipends,” as Inside Higher Ed reported. The same report gave numbers: the former editor in chief, Stephen Smith, said he received $8,000, a senior editor said she was paid $1,500 a year, and peer reviewers were not paid at all.
That unpaid review work is enormous. Aczel and colleagues estimated that reviewers around the world spent over 100 million hours on peer review in 2020, and that the time of US-based reviewers alone was worth over 1.5 billion US dollars [1]. They say their figures are very likely underestimates [1].
Imagine a popular neighborhood restaurant where the chefs, the servers and even the food critics all work for free, and the owner charges diners more each year. One day every chef quits and opens a place down the street with the same menu. The old sign is still up, but most regulars know where the cooking went.
That, roughly, is why I think reputation followed the people. A reader trusts NeuroImage because they trust its editors to choose good reviewers and its reviewers to catch weak work. Those are judgments made by specific people.
What the publisher kept, and what it had to rebuild
Elsevier did not lose the journal. It kept publishing NeuroImage, set up an interim board to review new submissions, and within a day posted paid, full-time jobs for a new editor-in-chief and senior scientific editor, according to Spectrum. None of the resigning editors had been Elsevier employees.
That detail says a lot. The journal stayed with the publisher. But the people who had given the name its standing were volunteers or modestly paid academics, and they could leave in an afternoon. The MIT Press announcement on May 15, 2023 said the new journal’s editor-in-chief would be Smith, “joined by the entire former editorial team.” Smith credited “the outpouring of support from our community of authors, reviewers, and readers.”
This had happened before. In 2015, 37 editors and board members left Elsevier’s linguistics journal Lingua, and in 2016 they founded the open-access journal Glossa, as Spectrum noted.
The publisher’s side is real
I do not want to pretend publishers add nothing. Running a journal takes a submission and review system, plagiarism and formatting checks, production and long-term hosting. David Amaral, editor of another journal, told Spectrum that large publishers handle those costs through “economies of scale,” and added, “I wouldn’t know how to do it myself.” Aczel and colleagues, who are hardly publisher cheerleaders, describe the journal article as “a co-production of researchers and publishers,” with publishers handling selection, screening, dissemination and indexing [1].
Elsevier also had an argument on price. A spokesman said the NeuroImage fee was “below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field,” as Inside Higher Ed reported, and an Elsevier spokesperson told Spectrum the closest competitor charged $3,900. And a known brand does help readers. A familiar title is a quick signal when you cannot judge every paper yourself.
I accept all of that. My disagreement is about proportions. Infrastructure can be bought from another press, as the editors showed by moving to MIT Press within weeks. What cannot be bought quickly is the trust of a research community in a particular group of editors.
What I take from it
Medical imaging is my field. I work on quantitative imaging and AI tools in a radiation oncology department, and my PhD was in medical physics, so brain imaging journals like these sit close to my own corner of science.
A publisher can own a journal’s name, but it cannot own its reputation. That reputation is lent, paper by paper and review by review, by the scientists who do the work, and they can take it elsewhere.
For readers, the practical lesson is to look past the title. Ask who edits a journal and how it reviews papers, not only how famous the name is. For scientists, the lesson is that our unpaid labor carries real weight, and in 2023 a group of 42 editors used it. Whether Imaging Neuroscience ends up as strong as the journal it left is a separate question. The walkout already showed who the reputation depended on.
References
[1] B. Aczel, B. Szaszi, and A. O. Holcombe, “A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review,” Research Integrity and Peer Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Art. no. 14, Nov. 2021, doi: 10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2.
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