Mass Editorial Resignations at Medical Journals: What Authors Need to Know in 2026

In April 2026, 45 of 48 editorial board members at the Journal of Approximation Theory resigned after what they described as Elsevier's "concerning and potentially detrimental" decisions following a change of editor-in-chief. Their departing statement was blunt: "the journal as we have known it has effectively ceased to exist." A month earlier, most of the editors at Communications in Algebra walked out from Taylor & Francis after the publisher removed the top editor and imposed a new multiple-review process the board considered incompatible with how their discipline handles manuscripts. These are mathematics journals, not medical ones, but they are the most recent in a long sequence of mass editorial exits that has repeatedly touched health and biomedical publishing, and the pattern is one every medical researcher needs to understand before choosing a submission target.

Retraction Watch has catalogued more than a dozen of these exits in 2024 and 2025 alone, and the list continues to grow. The phenomenon is not new, but the frequency has increased as publisher consolidation has left a smaller number of large commercial houses controlling a greater share of flagship journals. When the incentives of a publisher and its editorial board diverge, the board sometimes walks. When that happens, the journal does not disappear. It often persists under new leadership, carrying the same name and ISSN, but with a very different editorial culture. That is what "zombie journal" means in this context, and it is a problem authors are not always prepared for.

Why Editorial Boards Walk Out

Mass resignations almost always trace back to one of a small number of disputes, and understanding which type you are looking at tells you a lot about what the journal will look like afterward.

The most common trigger is a conflict over article processing charges. As publishers have expanded open access mandates, APCs have become a significant revenue stream, and commercial publishers have sometimes set fees well above what researchers in the relevant field can afford or what funders will cover. The most widely reported medical example is NeuroImage, a leading brain imaging journal published by Elsevier, where the entire editorial board of 42 members resigned in April 2023 after Elsevier declined to reduce the APC from $3,450 to the $2,000 or less the board had requested. The editors argued that the fee effectively excluded researchers from lower-income countries and from academic groups without strong institutional open-access funding. They resigned collectively and announced plans to launch a competing journal.

A second trigger is loss of editorial independence, usually precipitated by a publisher replacing the editor-in-chief without consulting the existing board. The Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics case, which unfolded in early 2025, followed this pattern. Karger Publishers informed one of the journal's editors-in-chief by email that her contract would not be renewed and that the journal needed to "take a new direction." The founding editor, Giovanni Fava, along with the co-editor-in-chief, most of the editorial board, and the statistical consultants resigned together. The journal had been among the most respected in psychosomatic medicine; what Karger characterized as a "normal editorial transition" the departing board characterized as an unjustified removal of independent editorial judgment.

A third trigger is concern about changes to the production process, especially when publishers have introduced AI into copyediting, typesetting, or reference checking in ways that produced errors. The Journal of Human Evolution case, which culminated in December 2024, included this complaint. The departing co-editors and most of the board cited inadequate copyediting support and open-access fees set too high for many authors. Elsevier's incorporation of AI into production was listed among the concerns, with the board asserting it had led to scientifically significant errors reaching publication.

GigaScience, a bioinformatics journal from Oxford University Press, saw a similar exit in 2025 following what the departing editors described as structural and editorial changes that included firing the editorial team and moving journal operations without consultation.

What Happens to the Journal After the Board Leaves

Publishers almost never close the journal. The title carries brand equity, citation history, and an established place in the Journal Citation Reports rankings. Closing it would mean writing off those assets. Instead, publishers typically appoint a new editor-in-chief, often quickly, and begin rebuilding the editorial board. The journal continues to operate under the same name, the same ISSN, and with the same impact factor history, even if the people responsible for its reputation over the past decade are no longer involved.

This produces what commentators have called a zombie journal: a publication that walks with the credentials of its former self but has lost the institutional knowledge, the specialist expertise on the editorial board, and the community trust that made those credentials meaningful. The name looks fine in a CV line or funding report. The substance is more uncertain, at least until the new editorial team establishes its own track record.

How long the zombie phase lasts depends on the journal and on how quickly a credible new editorial team can be assembled. Some journals recover. A publisher that appoints a respected figure from the community as the new editor, sets reasonable APCs, and gives that editor genuine independence can rebuild the journal's standing over several years. Others never do, effectively becoming publishing venues for authors who either do not know the history or are unconcerned by it.

The community response also varies. In fields with tight informal networks, word travels quickly, and the affected journal may face an informal boycott from leading researchers who decline to review or submit. In larger or more diffuse fields, the transition can go largely unnoticed outside the circle of researchers directly involved.

The Breakaway Journal Model

In some cases, the departing board does not simply resign and disperse. Instead, editors launch a new competing journal, often designed around the principles the original journal abandoned. This is sometimes called the "flip" or breakaway model, and when it works, it can shift the center of gravity in a field remarkably fast.

The NeuroImage case is the clearest example in recent medical and biomedical publishing. After the board's resignation in 2023, the departing editors announced the creation of Imaging Neuroscience, published by MIT Press. They committed to keeping the APC below $2,000 and waiving fees entirely for researchers from low- and middle-income countries. Because the founders were the same researchers who had edited NeuroImage for years, the new journal inherited much of the community's credibility. Authors who had previously published in NeuroImage now had a direct successor that carried the same leadership. Imaging Neuroscience has since attracted submissions that previously would have gone to its predecessor.

This pattern has historical precedent. When the entire editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics resigned from Elsevier in 2019, they founded Quantitative Science Studies, and Elsevier effectively tried to replace them by transforming the original title. The medical literature has examples too, even if less dramatic. Breakaway journals in psychiatry, rehabilitation medicine, and clinical nutrition have emerged from editorial disputes at Wiley and Elsevier over the past decade.

For authors, this creates a genuine navigation problem. You may need to decide whether to submit to the original title, now under new leadership, or to the newer breakaway journal staffed by the people who built the original's reputation. That is not always an obvious call, particularly early in the breakaway journal's lifespan before it has its own impact factor history. The right answer depends on your specific subfield, your career stage, your funder's requirements for journal prestige, and whether the breakaway journal has been indexed yet in Scopus or Web of Science.

What Happens to Your Manuscript During a Transition

If your paper is already under review at a journal when the editorial board resigns, the outcome for your submission depends on how the departure is negotiated between the outgoing editors and the publisher. This negotiation is more consequential than it often looks from the outside.

In the NeuroImage case, the departing board agreed to continue handling manuscripts already submitted during a twelve-month transition period. This arrangement protected authors who had papers in review at the time from the worst disruption. In other cases, editors have refused to take on any new manuscripts from the moment of resignation, leaving a backlog for the newly appointed team to manage. When that team lacks the same specialist expertise, the quality of review can suffer. Delays are common regardless of the arrangement, because the transition itself consumes editorial bandwidth.

The most difficult situation is one where the board resigns without a clear handoff agreement. In these cases, authors can find their papers in a genuine administrative limbo: not rejected, not advancing, with the submission system still technically active but the people who were reviewing the work no longer involved. If you are in this position, the appropriate response is to contact the editorial office directly, ask for a clear status update, and request an estimated timeline. You are also within your rights to withdraw the manuscript if the journal cannot provide a satisfactory response within a reasonable period. Withdrawing and resubmitting elsewhere is not typically penalized if you document your attempt to get clarity first.

What This Means for Papers Already Published

If you published in a journal before a mass resignation, your paper remains published. It retains its DOI, its indexed status (assuming the journal remains indexed), and its citation count. The resignation of the editorial board does not invalidate prior work, and your paper's standing in the literature is not automatically affected by events that occurred after it appeared.

The longer-term concern is reputational rather than bibliometric. If a journal undergoes a very public collapse and then operates for several years as a zombie publication with reduced quality control, papers published before the transition may find themselves in an awkward context. Reviewers evaluating a CV who are aware of the history may weight the publication differently. Readers who encounter the journal name might not distinguish between papers from the credible era and papers from the post-transition period. This kind of reputational contamination is slow and uneven, and it is very difficult to measure. But it is real in fields where the journal's name matters as a quality signal.

There is not much an individual author can do about this retroactively. The practical response is forward-looking: understand which journals in your field have undergone or are at risk of this kind of transition, and factor that information into future submission decisions.

How to Vet a Journal's Editorial Stability Before You Submit

The information you need to assess editorial stability is largely public, but it requires looking in places authors do not always check. The goal is to form a judgment about whether the current editorial leadership is stable, credible, and genuinely independent from the publisher.

Start with the editorial board page on the journal's website. Check whether the listed editors are real researchers with verifiable institutional affiliations and published records in the journal's subject area. An editorial board that lists unfamiliar names without institutional details, or that includes a large number of editors from a single institution or country, deserves further scrutiny. Compare the current board with any publicly available historical versions. If the board composition has changed dramatically in the past year or two without a corresponding public explanation, that is worth investigating.

Check Retraction Watch. The site maintains both a mass resignations tracker and a list of journals where editorial disputes have been reported. It is not comprehensive, but it covers most major cases involving journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. If your target journal appears on either list, read the details before submitting.

Look at recent papers. If the journal has published a mass resignation letter or an editorial statement from outgoing editors, it will usually appear as a formal article in the journal itself. Publishers occasionally publish their own response statements. Reading both, if they exist, gives you a fair picture of what the dispute was about and what the current situation is.

Ask colleagues. Researchers in your subfield who have submitted to or reviewed for the journal recently often have informal knowledge about editorial practices that is not documented anywhere. A conversation with two or three people who have interacted with the journal recently can tell you more than any checklist.

The Broader Question: What This Reveals About Journal Ownership

Mass editorial resignations are symptomatic of a structural tension in academic publishing that is not going to resolve quickly. Academic journals were historically built by scholarly communities. Their reputations were created by the researchers who edited them, reviewed for them, and published in them over decades. Commercial publishers acquired many of these journals, and the title, the ISSN, and the citation history transferred with the acquisition. The community expertise and goodwill that built the reputation did not transfer by contract. It stayed with the people.

When publisher priorities and editorial priorities diverge, that distinction becomes visible. The publisher controls the brand. The editorial board controls the credibility. Neither can fully replace what the other provides. The resulting disputes are almost never resolvable once they become public, because the act of publishing a resignation letter makes reconciliation politically implausible.

For medical authors, this structural reality means that journal quality is not static. A journal that was genuinely excellent five years ago under a founding editorial team may be operating in a very different mode today under different leadership and different publisher priorities. The impact factor, the Scopus quartile, and the journal name are all lagging indicators. They reflect the work done by people who may no longer be involved. This does not mean you should avoid established journals. It means you should treat editorial quality as something that needs to be verified rather than assumed, especially for high-stakes submissions where the quality of peer review is as important as the journal's metrics.

What Authors Can Watch for in 2026

The pace of mass resignations is unlikely to slow in the near term. Publisher consolidation continues, APC inflation remains an unresolved pressure point, and AI integration into editorial workflows is creating new disputes about quality and oversight. The journals most at risk are those where the editorial board's sense of scientific mission is strong, the community is cohesive enough to act collectively, and the publisher has been making decisions the board considers commercially driven rather than scientifically sound.

In medical publishing specifically, the fields where these dynamics are most active include neuroscience and neuroimaging, psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, clinical genetics, and bioinformatics. These are fields with organized communities, strong norms around publishing independence, and active debates about APC equity. They are also fields where the research tends to carry clinical implications, which raises the stakes for peer review quality.

The clearest practical signal for any individual researcher is a sudden large-scale change to a journal's editorial board combined with no public explanation. If a journal that had stable leadership for years suddenly shows an entirely different editorial board without an editorial statement describing the transition, it is worth pausing before submitting. The absence of explanation does not prove a problematic departure, but it warrants a direct inquiry to the editorial office or a conversation with colleagues who know the journal.

Academic publishing depends on trust extended between authors, editors, and readers. When that trust breaks down at the editorial level, authors bear a disproportionate share of the consequences. Understanding the mechanics of mass resignations, and what they mean for journals you care about, is part of managing your own publishing strategy thoughtfully.

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