Profit-mad Elsevier pushed too hard and too far on the Journal of Human Evolution, and the entire editorial board of resigned en masse. I doubt many people outside of the directly relevant fields care much about the journal (I certainly haven’t), so it’s easy to rubberneck in that vaguely sympathetic way, driving by and shaking one’s head. And this kind of story has become a bit too familiar in the world of academic publishing, which makes it even easier. And, on top of that, we’ve grown numb to seeing the places we loved vanish one by one, as woods are felled for housing tracts with Ye Olde Sounding names and greasy spoon diners are replaced with pop-up Halloween shops. But the JHE board’s account of the events leading up the resignation (courtesy of Retraction Watch) is well worth reading, because it’s a useful reminder of how peculiar many of these journals were. Defending that peculiarity isn’t just an exercise in Village Green Preservation Societies–style nostalgia; it’s also a necessary strategy — political, social, cultural, economic — for maintaining the hard-won institutions we depend on to insulate the search for truth from the search for profit. But there’s nothing inviting about that, let alone motivating or even compelling. Who wants to “defend” some august but obscure academic journal?Literally no one — not even the editorial board. So there’s a challenge for 2025: to think about how to frame and phrase this cause in more appealing and effective ways.