Between March and July 2026, editorial boards at three established, indexed journals — published respectively by Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis — resigned en masse. Each dispute is distinct, but together they add three well-documented cases to a pattern Retraction Watch’s Mass Resignations List has tracked since 2015 and now shows accelerating: as of these 2026 entries the list runs to 56 documented cases, with the frequency of such events described by Retraction Watch as having picked up in recent years. This piece lays out what happened at each journal, in the editors’ own stated terms and the publishers’ documented actions, without taking a side.
What a mass resignation signals
A journal’s editorial board is the body of scholars responsible for overseeing peer review and safeguarding a journal’s scholarly standards; editors-in-chief and associate editors typically serve on a volunteer or lightly-compensated basis, distinct from the publisher’s commercial staff. Publication-ethics bodies such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) treat editorial independence — editors’ ability to make content and process decisions free of undue commercial interference — as a baseline expectation of scholarly publishing governance. When a substantial share of a board resigns at once, it typically signals that editors believe that independence has been breached, not routine turnover. None of the three journals below is a predatory journal; each is an established, subscription- or hybrid-model venue with a decades-long publication history, which is part of why these resignations drew wide attention within mathematics and statistics circles specifically.
Journal of Approximation Theory (Elsevier): an editor-in-chief transition dispute
In April 2026, 45 of the 48 members of the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory, published by Elsevier on ScienceDirect, resigned. Paul Nevai had served as editor-in-chief since 1990; when his tenure ended in late 2025, Elsevier moved to install a different editor-in-chief rather than continue with the board’s preferred succession. The resigning editors cited increased publisher oversight of editorial decisions and pressure to accelerate article production as the underlying grievance, writing that, in their assessment, “the journal as we have known it has effectively ceased to exist.” Retraction Watch’s April 16, 2026 report is the primary public account of the dispute; Elsevier had not, as of that reporting, published a detailed rebuttal to the board’s characterization of events.
Statistics and Computing (Springer Nature): an APC mandate
In July 2026, 18 of the roughly 160 associate editors of Statistics and Computing, published by Springer Nature, announced their resignation, effective 31 December 2026. The trigger was Springer Nature’s decision to convert the journal from a hybrid model — optional open access alongside subscription access — to fully article-processing-charge-funded open access starting in 2027, with a $2,990 APC applied to all submissions from July 1, 2026 onward and no free-to-publish option outside of formal waivers. In a July 8 letter to editor-in-chief Ajay Jasra, the resigning associate editors called the change “irreconcilable with our vision of science.” Retraction Watch’s July 9, 2026 report, along with independent commentary on the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog and a first-hand account reposted on Xi’an’s Og, corroborate the figures and the July 1 effective date of the APC. The 18 resigning editors are a minority of the full associate-editor pool, and observers quoted in that coverage expected further resignations to follow.
Communications in Algebra (Taylor & Francis): referee load and an editor-in-chief removal
In March 2026, 23 of the 31 members of the editorial board of Communications in Algebra, published by Taylor & Francis, signed a resignation letter dated March 10. The board cited two grievances: a unilateral publisher decision to require more than one referee report per submission — which the editors argued would either exhaust the pool of willing reviewers or dilute review quality, given how labor-intensive mathematics refereeing already is — and the removal of editor-in-chief Scott Chapman without consulting the board beforehand, which the editors characterized as a “cloak-and-dagger removal.” The board’s own letter is published at commalg.org; Retraction Watch’s March 17, 2026 report corroborates the signatory count and both stated grievances.
Part of a documented, accelerating pattern
Retraction Watch’s Mass Resignations List situates all three 2026 cases within a longer run of similar disputes dating back to 1989, with a marked increase in frequency in recent years — eight journals saw mass resignations in 2023 alone, and multiple cases, including the three above, are logged in 2026. Across the full list, the recurring triggers cluster around a small set of issues: open-access fee structures and APC changes, publisher interference in editorial or refereeing decisions, pressure to increase publication volume, and unilateral management decisions such as removing an editor-in-chief without board input. The three 2026 cases above map onto that same set — governance/EIC-transition, APC policy, and referee-workload/EIC-removal, respectively — rather than representing a new or unrelated category of dispute.
Why this matters for research administrators and institutions
These disputes are directly relevant to research offices and library/publishing-support staff for practical reasons, separate from the underlying governance questions. An APC mandate imposed mid-cycle, as at Statistics and Computing, changes the cost calculus for any grant-funded article processing charge budgeted against that journal, and institutions tracking approved-journal or preferred-venue lists should expect these to need periodic review as publisher policies shift. A sudden editor-in-chief change or a wave of board resignations can also affect a journal’s effective turnaround time and review rigor for a period, which matters when advising researchers on submission timing. More broadly, editorial board composition and stability are one of the signals research offices and librarians already use, alongside indexing status and publisher reputation, when assessing a journal’s current standing — see CASRAI’s guide to editorial board responsibilities for what the role itself normally involves, and the publishing pillar page for the broader landscape these disputes sit within.
What to watch next
None of the three boards above has announced a decision to launch an independent successor journal, unlike some earlier cases on Retraction Watch’s list where a resigning board relaunched elsewhere; as of this writing, the practical next step in each case — whether the publisher replaces the departed editors, negotiates a resolution, or the journal’s standing is otherwise affected — is unresolved and worth monitoring directly via Retraction Watch’s ongoing coverage rather than treating any single report as final.
