Imaging Neuroscience opening editorial

Stephen Smith (Oxford, UK), Til Ole Bergmann (Johannes Gutenberg, Mainz, Germany), Birte Forstmann (Amsterdam,
Netherlands), Alain Dagher (McGill, Montreal, Canada), Shella Keilholz (Emory / Georgia Tech, USA), Kristen Kennedy
(UT Dallas, USA), Sonja A. Kotz (Maastricht, Netherlands), Cindy Lustig (University of Michigan, USA), Bruce Pike
(University of Calgary, Canada), Marc Tittgemeyer (Cologne, Germany), Mark Woolrich (Oxford, UK), B.T. Thomas Yeo
(NUS, Singapore), Andrew Alexander (Madison, Wisconsin, USA), Janine Bijsterbosch (Wash U, St Louis, USA),
Tjeerd Boonstra (Maastricht, Netherlands), Mallar Chakravarty (Quebec, Canada), Chris Chambers (Cardiff, UK),
Catie Chang (Vanderbilt, USA), Bradley Christian (Madison, Wisconsin, USA), Sarang S. Dalal (Aarhus, Denmark),
Nai Ding (Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China), Audrey Duarte (UT Austin, USA), Audrey P. Fan (UC Davis, USA), Alexandre
Gramfort (Paris-Saclay, France), Gesa Hartwigsen (Leipzig University and MPI-CBS Leipzig, Germany), Mbemba Jabbi
(UT Austin, USA), Peter Kochunov (UTHSC Houston, USA), Ulrike Krämer (Lübeck, Germany), Martin Lindquist
(Johns Hopkins, USA), Jean-Francois Mangin (NeuroSpin, France), Kevin Murphy (Cardiff, UK), Jonathan Polimeni
(Harvard, USA), Emma Robinson (KCL, UK), Monica Rosenberg (University of Chicago, USA), Sepideh Sadaghiani
(UIUC, Illinois, USA), Mohamed Seghier (Khalifa University, UAE), Yen-Yu Ian Shih (UNC Chapel Hill, USA),
Axel Thielscher (TU Denmark, Denmark), Lucina Q. Uddin (UCLA, USA), Dimitri Van De Ville (EPFL and UNIGE,
Switzerland), Wim Vanduffel (KU Leuven, Belgium), Chao-Gan Yan (CAS, Beijing, China), Anastasia Yendiki (Harvard, USA)

Corresponding Author: Stephen Smith (stephen.smith@ndcn.ox.ac.uk)

ABSTRACT
In this editorial we introduce a new non-profit open access journal, Imaging Neuroscience. In April 2023, editors of the
journals NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports resigned, and a month later launched Imaging Neuroscience.
NeuroImage had long been the leading journal in the field of neuroimaging. While the move to fully open access in
2020 represented a positive step toward modern academic practices, the publication fee was set to a level that the
editors found unethical and unsustainable. The publisher of NeuroImage, Elsevier, was unwilling to reduce the fee
after much discussion. This led us to launch Imaging Neuroscience with MIT Press, intended to replace NeuroImage
as our field’s leading journal, but with greater control by the neuroimaging academic community over publication fees
and adoption of modern and ethical publishing practices.

NEUROIMAGE, APC DISCUSSIONS, AND DECISION TO LEAVE ELSEVIER

NeuroImage was launched in 1992, and grew in size and
impact over the following 30 years. By 2022, it was pub-
lishing almost 1,000 papers per year, and had an im pact
factor of 7.4. NeuroImage:Reports was a companion-
journal started in 2021, promoting the publication of null
findings and article types such as Registered Reports.

NeuroImage began with a pay-to-read publication
model.1 Almost 20 years later, it switched to a hybrid

1 Interestingly, even the one-page opening Editorial by Arthur Toga cost $5 to read in 1992 (and today costs $36). The editorial itself though has stood the test
of time extremely well, and could easily have been used for our editorial here.

model, where some papers were pay-to-read and the oth-
ers were pay-to-publish (i.e., providing open access, OA).
Academics in the neuroimaging community have increas-
ingly expressed concerns about the very high publication
cost at journals like NeuroImage and Human Brain Map-
ping, but until fairly recently, the main focus for journal edi-
tors was persuading publishers to switch to being fully OA.
By 2020, the editorial team (led by the Editor-in-Chief at
the time, Michael Breakspear) had succeeded in persuad-
ing the publisher to make the journal fully OA. However,
the fee to publish (the article publication charge or APC)
remained under the exclusive control of the publisher. The
APC was initially set at $3,000 USD. Going forward, it Imaging Neuroscience, Volume 1, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_e_00007 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/imag/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/imag_e_00007/2154692/imag_e_00007.pdf by guest on 07 September 2023 © 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. EditorialSmith et al. Imaging Neuroscience, Volume 1, 2023 appeared that a focus on profits would continue to put unrelenting upward pressure on the APC, and many were concerned that the high level of profit implied by high fees was unethical and unsustainable. Image or NeuroImage:Reports prior to our resignation. However, we are not handling new submissions, and Elsevier are currently using in-house staff to handle the editorial process for new submissions. By 2022, Elsevier had raised the NeuroImage APC to $3,450, without consulting the editors. The fee level at for-
profit journals is generally decided by the publisher after
consideration of “market forces”, meaning that the fees
are set by looking at competing journals’ fees, and work-
ing out how much authors are willing to pay, given the per-
ceived reputation and importance of a journal. This practice
means that an APC often does not directly relate to the
actual costs of publishing a paper, and has led to some
academic publishers achieving extremely high profit mar-
gins. Estimates of direct article costs at relevant journals,
particularly those that outsource much of the production
process to lower-quality external production companies,
are generally considerably lower than the APC.

High fees are prohibitive for researchers in less-
well-funded countries, and to those with funding sources
placing restrictions on the APC, leading to inequities.
High fees are highly burdensome to smaller and newer
labs. Even in established labs, high APCs divert precious
research funding away from actual research activities,
and from the salaries and conference costs of junior
researchers. Academics and funders increasingly feel
that it is unethical for publishers to make such high prof-
its, particularly given that the publishers do not fund the
original science, write the articles, or pay reviewers, and
pay minimal editorial stipends. There is a common pat-
tern whereby an editorial team (and everyone in their
field) contribute to building up a journal’s quality and rep-
utation over many years, to then have publishers increase
the fee of successful journals. As a result of all the above
factors, authors and reviewers are increasingly refusing
to work with for-profit journals.

In June 2022, we, the NeuroImage editors, formally
requested that Elsevier reduce the APC to under $2,000. After subsequent discussions on this, no reduction was offered, and we wrote again in March 2023, explaining that we would all resign and start a new journal if the APC was not reduced. In April, Elsevier responded to all edi- tors stating that the APC would not be reduced, because they believe that market forces support an APC of $3,450.
As a result, all editors (more than 40 Handling Editors,
Associate Editors, Senior Editors, and Editors-in-Chief)
across NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports resigned.
To avoid adverse impact on authors with papers under
current consideration, we are continuing to handle the
final set of papers that were already submitted to Neuro-

We took the decision to resign with great regret. We
love our field, and are immensely proud that NeuroImage
represented the very best of our science. NeuroImage
was a crucial standard-setting venue for a field that needs
and benefitted from methodological and neuroscientific
rigour over the last three decades. The editors have
invested enormous effort into NeuroImage over many
years, and none of us had wanted to see it decline or
disappear. NeuroImage had always benefitted from an
extremely committed set of editors who are leaders in our
field and a highly effective, collaborative team; we also
had a large bank of dedicated and technically brilliant
reviewers. We were torn between wanting NeuroImage to
continue as our top journal versus our conviction that we
need to take a stand on the excessive APC. We believe
that journals with high APCs cannot succeed in the long
term, as researchers increasingly object to unreasonably
high costs of publication and access. We, therefore,
strongly believe that we took the right action. In that
regard, we are reassured by having received support for
our action from all previous NeuroImage Editors-in-Chief,
who have similarly dedicated many years to the journal.

STARTING IMAGING NEUROSCIENCE

On 17 April 2023, we publicly announced our resignation
and the intention to start a new journal. The response (on
Twitter, over email, and as reported in many venues such
as Times Higher Education and Nature News2) was very
large and positive. Within a few days, the announcement
had been viewed 2 million times. The response was not
just from people in our field; people across academia
have been expressing support and suggesting that jour-
nals in other fields make a similar change. Within a few
days, we had over 1,200 people volunteer to review for
Imaging Neuroscience.

2 Our move has been reported widely, including in: Nature News (https://www
. nature . com / articles / d41586 – 023 – 01391 – 5), Times Higher Education (https://
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/mass-resignations-elsevier-
journal-over-unethical-price-hike), The Guardian (https://www . theguardian . com
/ science / 2023 / may / 07 / too – greedy – mass – walkout – at – global – science – journal
– over – unethical – fees and https://www . theguardian . com / science / audio / 2023 / may
/ 16 / is – it – the – beginning – of – the – end – for – scientific – publishing – podcast),
Inside Higher Ed (https://www . insidehighered . com / news / faculty – issues / research
/ 2023 / 04 / 20 / exodus – elsevier – neuroscience – journal), Spectrum (https://www
. spectrumnews . org / news / imaging – journal – editors – resign – over – extreme – open
– access – fees/), and Technology Networks (https://www . technologynetworks . com
/ tn / news / mass – resignation – at – leading – neuroscience – journals – prompted – by
– high – article – processing – fees – 372339).

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Smith et al.

Imaging Neuroscience, Volume 1, 2023

All of the editors have worked together to start Imag-
ing Neuroscience, which is being published by MIT Press,
a highly respected non-profit academic publisher. Fol-
lowing the resignation in mid-April, we were ready to start
receiving submissions by mid-May, with an interim
paper-handling system using the open source Janeway
publishing platform.3 Within two months, we had already
received over 150 journal submissions. We are very
grateful to the authors and reviewers of these early sub-
missions for their support and willingness to place their
trust in us. We applaud these authors for their help in
moving our field away from for-profit publishers. We have
been able to get the new journal going so quickly, in part
because of the enthusiasm and efficiency at MIT Press,
and because we already had the established framework
of the entire editorial team and a positive and collabora-
tive journal ethos. In our APC discussions with MIT
Press, we were extremely pleased that profit was not a
consideration—they merely need to cover their costs as
a high quality but non-profit publisher. Similarly, there is
no pressure from MIT Press to lower the scientific stan-
dards of the journal (in order to make more money by
publishing more papers), which is often the case with for-
profit publishers.

One foundational principle of Imaging Neuroscience is
to keep the APC as low as possible, and to waive the APC
for authors from low/middle-income countries (LMIC). The
starting APC is $1,600. MIT Press and the editorial team are actively seeking philanthropic sponsorship, to reduce this further, and offer a larger number of waivers in deserv- ing cases. In addition, as the journal grows and economy- of-scale improves, further APC reductions should be possible. The APC fee is waived if the last author’s main institution is in an LMIC, currently defined as the country having an expenditure on R&D per capita4 of under $200.
This definition of LMIC is more liberal and inclusive than is
often applied for journal waivers. Of course, the actual
costs associated with waived papers need to be covered
from the APC of non-waived papers.

The editorial structure is the same as it was at Neuro-
Image: we have the Editor-in-Chief, 11 Senior Editors,
and 31 Handling Editors. In the future, changes in the
editorship will happen naturally, with editors (including
EiC) rotating in and out over time. In addition to the edito-
rial team, we have an Editorial Board of over 60 academ-
ics in our field. The EB exists to provide a wider pool of

3 https://janeway . systems/
4 https://en . wikipedia . org / wiki / List _ of _ sovereign _ states _ by _ research _ and
_ development _ spending

wisdom and expertise to help the core editorial team in
their planning, and as a “trusted reflection” of the state of
the field as a whole. The EB is also valuable as a group of
respected and enthusiastic reviewers (including acting as
triage and adjudicating reviewers), and as potential future
Handling Editors.

The overall scope, quality threshold, and entire edito-
rial team is the same as it had been at NeuroImage (com-
bined with NeuroImage:Reports). The scope of the journal
includes research that significantly contributes to the
understanding of brain function, structure, and behaviour
through the application of neuroimaging, as well as major
advances in brain imaging methods. The focus is on
imaging of the brain and spinal cord, in humans and other
species, and includes neurophysiological and neuromod-
ulation methods.

While the primary focus is on the macro-level organiza-
tion of the human brain, the journal also considers research
using meso- and micro-scopic neuroimaging in all spe-
cies, if it contributes to a systems-level comprehension of
the human brain or probes biophysical properties and pro-
cesses through brain imaging. The scope includes work
that explicitly addresses these questions in clinical popu-
lations or animal models. However, regular submissions
reporting on apparent effects of disease will only be con-
sidered to be within scope if they enhance our under-
standing of mechanisms of brain function or dysfunction,
or develop a new neuroimaging methodology. This ques-
tion of clinical scope can be tricky, but one way of thinking
about this is: if a given paper is predominantly showing the
effect of a specific disease on the brain in such a way that
the methods and results are only innovative and informa-
tive for readers working on this disease, then the paper is
unlikely to be suitable for the journal.

Imaging Neuroscience publishes original research arti-
cles, review papers, theoretical models of brain function,
data resource papers, software toolbox papers, technical
notes, comments, and perspectives. Given the scope of
NeuroImage:Reports, Imaging Neuroscience will also
welcome high-quality research focused on replications or
reporting null findings. We strongly encourage open shar-
ing of datasets and code.

We also publish Registered Reports, with a scope that
is identical to regular articles except for relaxing the restric-
tions on clinical focus described above. In contrast to reg-
ular submissions, Registered Reports undergo a two-stage
review process in which the rationale and methodology are
evaluated before the research is conducted, and if
assessed favourably, the study is then accepted in
advance, regardless of the main results. Once the research

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Smith et al.

Imaging Neuroscience, Volume 1, 2023

is complete, authors then submit a Stage 2 manuscript
that includes the outcomes and conclusions, and the
entire programme of work is then published in the journal
as a complete article. By deciding which research is pub-
lished based on theory and methods, independently of
results, Registered Reports aim to eliminate various forms
of bias that hinder reproducibility and transparency, includ-
ing publication bias and analytic reporting bias. The best
current route to publishing a Registered Report in Imaging
Neuroscience is via the Peer Community in Registered
Reports (PCI RR), which coordinates peer review at the
preprint stage and then gives authors the option to publish
their recommended manuscript without further peer review
in a range of PCI RR-friendly journals.5

The editorial team comprises individuals with diverse
specialties, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of imag-
ing neuroscience. We also place high value on equity,
diversity, and inclusion. We are aiming for balanced repre-
sentation of gender in the journal leadership; at present,
half of the Senior Editors and a third of the Handling Edi-
tors are women. We will continue to further improve this
and other aspects of diverse representation; as editors
rotate off over time, we prioritise recruitment from under-
represented groups.

would support a major change—some research areas
may be less ready than others. In our case, the editors at
NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports had a great deal of
input from people in our field over several years, includ-
ing many researchers refusing to review for or submit
their work to journals at for-profit publishers.

We are committed to making Imaging Neuroscience a
beacon of what academic publishing can be: not only by
becoming the top journal in our field, where the best work
can be found, but also by embracing the way forward in
non-profit publishing. Although we appreciate that com-
mercial publishers need to make some profit to remain
viable, we believe that the era of extreme levels of profit
made by some publishers is coming to an end.

The neuroimaging community has always been keen
to push boundaries and embrace progress. So, as we
took this collective leap, we were elated but not surprised
by the overwhelming support from the imaging neurosci-
ence community for what we are aiming to achieve. As
we already see a steady increase in the number of
high-quality papers being submitted, we are confident
that the future is bright for Imaging Neuroscience—and
imaging neuroscience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

OUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE

We have been contacted by editors at other journals who
are interested to know more about the process we have
been going through. Many are thinking about moving
away from for-profit publishers or are aiming to achieve
significant APC reduction. This kind of action requires a
significant commitment and coordinated effort, starting
with open and detailed discussions within an editorial
team, followed by discussions with the publisher. One of
the factors in this decision is whether editors see an over-
whelming strength of feeling in their particular field that

We are extremely grateful to Paul McCarthy and Kaitlin
Krebs from FMRIB Oxford, for their intensive and diligent
work, creating the interim paper-handling platform for
Imaging Neuroscience, and acting as interim Managing
Editor, respectively. Stephen Smith would like to thank
Karla Miller for her support and wisdom through these
challenging changes. Finally, we are very grateful to
Michael Breakspear for his careful reading of this editorial
(as well as being a superb past EiC), and to Nick Lindsay
at MIT Press for his enthusiastic and professional help
with this move.

5 https://rr . peercommunityin . org/

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