Over 40 neuroscientists, including one from India, have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top research journal in protest against what they view as excessive processing charges levied on scientists for publishing open-access research papers.

Arpan Banerjee at the National Brain Research Centre in Manesar (Haryana) is among those who have quit NeuroImage, a journal published by Elsevier, an international publishing company. Some of those who quit have decided to start a new non-profit journal to be called Imaging Neuroscience.

“NeuroImage’s editorial team has tried to convince Elsevier to reduce the publication fee from $3,450 as we believe large profit is unethical and unsustainable,” those who stepped down have said in a statement released on Twitter. “Elsevier is unwilling to reduce the fee, therefore, with great regret, all editors (more than 40 academic editors) of NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports have resigned.”

NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports publish research papers aimed at gaining insights into the brain’s structure and functions.

Academic editors are typically top scientists in specific fields — in this case, neuroscience — who help guide decisions on which research papers the journal should publish. They are often faculty members at leading academic institutions.

The mass resignation, which some scientists say is unprecedented in academic journals, is centred on the contentious issue of charges that scientists have to pay to publish in so-called open-access research papers that are available free of charge to anyone.

Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, had set the processing charge at $3,450 per article. The scientists who have resigned said compared against this fee, estimates of direct article costs at relevant journals are generally around $1,000 or lower.

“Scientists and funders (funding agencies) increasingly feel it is wrong for publishers to make such high profits, particularly given that publishers do not fund the original science, or the writing of articles, or payments to reviewers, and pay minimal editorial stipends,” they said in their statement.

Elsevier, in a statement on the journal’s website, said it was “disappointed” with the editors’ decision to step down from their roles as the company has been “engaging constructively” with them over the past couple of years since they took the decision to make NeuroImage a fully open-access journal.

“In line with our policy of our setting article publishing charges competitively below the market average relative to quality,” Elsevier has said, “the fee that has been set for fully open-access NeuroImage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field”.

“We’re not saying publishing houses shouldn’t make money, we’re not anti-profit,” said Banerjee, who was a NeuroImage editorial board member. “But some publishing houses appear to be making excessive profits from taxpayers since much of research is funded by government agencies in most countries.”