A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece here in the Scholarly Kitchen that posed a question: “Is the essence of a journal portable?”.

What gave rise to that question was a spate of shake-ups at some major scientific journals. Some editors had been fired, some editorial boards had departed en masse. The particular situation that had really caught my attention was the wholesale defection of the editorial board from an Elsevier journal called NeuroImage. Upon leaving that journal, the board declared its intention to create a new, competing journal that would (in the words of one news report) “eclipse NeuroImage in standing… the fact that the entire editorial staff is making the shift will ensure the new journal’s quality.”

True to its word, the erstwhile NeuroImage board then founded Imaging NeuroScience, which it now publishes with MIT Press.

The question that occurred to me, and on which I mused in my Kitchen post, was whether potential authors would see the board as the essence of the journal, regard Imaging NeuroScience as the “new” and “real” NeuroImage, and shift their submission behavior accordingly. If the neuroscience author community sees the board as the defining feature of the journal, then that community would likely follow the editorial board from the old journal to the new one; but if, on the other hand, the author community sees the journal’s identity as being essentially independent from the specific makeup of its editorial board, then the departure of NeuroImage’s board might have little effect on the journal.

Multiple possible scenarios were possible, including:

• Having lost its editorial board and replaced it with a new one, NeuroImage could wither and die, its market of potential authors seeing it as fatally damaged.
• NeuroImage might continue to thrive, being seen by its audience as still essentially the same journal it had been with the previous board.
• Imaging NeuroScience might succeed, even as NeuroImage also continues to succeed, authors seeing both of them as at least reasonable (maybe even equally desirable) venues in which to publish.
• Imaging NeuroScience might fail.

Two and a half years later, where are we? I decided to pose five questions to both Andrew Davis (VP for Global Communications at Elsevier) and Nick Lindsay (Director of Journals and Institutional Partnerships at MIT Press). I’ll summarize the responses I received, and then offer some brief observations on those responses.

Question 1: Have submissions to your journal met expectations during the past 18 months? If not, how close have they gotten?

For NeuroImage, Davis reported an initial drop in submissions following the editorial board’s departure, but said that since that time, submissions have “returned to pre-transition levels.” Before the transition, submissions were hovering between 2,400 and 3,000 per year, and they are now back at that level and “continuing to grow.” Davis characterized this level as “broadly in line with expectations.”

Lindsay reported significantly lower submission levels for Imaging Neuroscience, but characterized them as “ahead of expectations” – which seems reasonable given how new the journal is. MIT Press had planned on 525 submissions in 2024 (the journal’s first full year of publication) and 750 in 2025, but actually received 878 and 865, respectively.

Question 2: Has your journal’s publication output met your expectations during the past 18 months? If not, how close has it gotten?

For Imaging Neuroscience, Lindsay reports that it published 52 articles during its first year of publication in 2023 (a publishing year that began in August), then 353 articles in 2024 and 444 in 2025. This far exceeds their expectations; Lindsay says that their “initial optimistic projections had us publishing 200 articles in 2024 and 300 in 2025.”

Davis reports that NeuroImage had publication output “somewhat below historic levels during (the) period (immediately after the board’s departure), largely due to reduced capacity while recruiting and embedding the new editorial leadership team.” They anticipated, and saw, a roughly 20% decrease in publication volume in 2024 as compared to 2023 – but he reports that 2025 publication levels were 10% higher than what the journal saw prior to the editorial board’s departure, and that output continues to grow.

Question 3: What impact or citation metrics do you use to measure the success of your journal? Is it meeting your expectations on these measures?

According to Davis, NeuroImage relies on “citation-based metrics like CiteScore to assess journal performance over time,” and he reports that on this basis, NeuroImage’s performance “remains broadly comparable with pre-transition levels. The 2024 CiteScore is 10.8, with a 2021 CiteScore of 11.2.”

Imaging Neuroscience is still new enough that it does not yet have an impact factor (IF), and its h-index has not yet had time to mature. However, according to a couple of less-formal metrics, Lindsay reports very satisfying performance: “from 2023-2025, 22 of the top 200 MIT Press articles based on number of citations (data from Dimensions) were published in Imaging Neuroscience.” He also noted that when it comes to “the average citation per published paper as a function of publication year… Imaging Neuroscience (is already) ahead of… NeuroImage and Brain Mapping” for 2024 and 2025.

(Scholarly Kitchen readers may remember a study published here 13 years ago by Todd Carpenter, in which he found that IFs tend not only to be resilient for journals that have experienced editorial mutinies, but also that the resulting new journals tend to do fine in that regard.)

Question 4: (For NeuroImage) What was NeuroImage’s rejection rate prior to the departure of its editorial board, and what is its rejection rate now? (For Imaging Neuroscience): What is the rejection rate for your journal, and is it increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same?

Lindsay said that during its first two full years of publication, Imaging Neuroscience maintained a steady rejection rate of 67%.

Davis shared specific rejection data off the record, but was willing to share publicly that NeuroImage’s rejection rate has remained effectively unchanged since its board’s departure.

Question 5: What else would you like our readers to know about how your journal is performing?

Davis shared that NeuroImage has “seen meaningful changes in the composition of the journal’s author community… with a higher proportion (of submissions) now coming from Asia – 65% in 2025 compared to 26% in 2022. This likely reflects a combination of strong growth in the Asian research market, the increasing use of more cost-effective imaging modalities, and an expansion of NeuroImage’s scope, which has enabled a more diverse authorship community than in the past.”

Lindsay and his team are feeling bullish about Imaging Neuroscience, finding that the answer to the question “would the neuroimaging community be willing to follow the editorial team and board to a new title that didn’t have the publishing legacy, brand, or citation metrics” of an established journal has clearly turned out to be “a pretty resounding yes.” He points out that “in under 2.5 years, (Imaging Neuroscience has become) the #2 journal in the field in terms of article output and is now gaining citations at a rate better than that of journals that have been established for decades,” and that the journal’s robust growth has enabled MIT Press to lower its article-processing charge from $1,600 to $1,400.

Comments and Observations

For me, this has been a fascinating exercise, one that leads to several reflections:

My original question – is the essence of a journal portable? – remains unanswered, and may in fact be unanswerable. The neuroscience research community has obviously welcomed Imaging Neuroscience; however, it does not seem to have abandoned or penalized NeuroImaging. Rather than the “essence” of the original journal departing with its editorial board and taking up residence at another publisher, in the case of NeuroImaging the journal seems instead to have reproduced by fission – splitting, like a planarian, into two new and independent journals, both of which are thriving.

This could suggest that the makeup of the original editorial board was of little importance to the author community, and that NeuroImage’s reputation was not seriously harmed, or its status as a desirable publishing venue reduced, by the board’s departure. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean this. It may be that the original author community has migrated disproportionately to Imaging Neuroscience, and that the slack is being taken up by a somewhat different community (significantly from Asia) such that NeuroImage continues to do well simply because there has been either a growing need for publishing venues, or because there was a large unmet need prior to the establishment of Imaging Neuroscience – a need now being better met by the expanded number of journals. If this is the case, then NeuroImaging may have suffered a reputational hit and yet still be receiving all the high-quality submissions it needs to continue thriving.

One check on this theory is NeuroImaging’s citation performance. If its reputation had been significantly harmed by the board departure, and/or if it is now publishing lower-quality science, we should expect to see lower citations. But by that metric, NeuroImage seems to have suffered little if at all so far, with a CiteScore effectively unchanged since before the transition.

Of course, Davis’ observation about NeuroImage‘s “expansion of… scope” is intriguing. If the journal had not expanded its scope in the wake of its board’s departure, how would it be performing now? There’s no real way of knowing.

But the bottom line seems to be that there have been no real losers as a result of this split. Both journals are doing well, and the neuroscience community now has significantly more opportunity to publish high-quality work. Imaging Neuroscience hasn’t “eclipsed” NeuroImage, but it is certainly off to a good start as a solid competitor.