The sale closed in August 2026. For €360,000, about $417,000, a Delaware-registered company called CNBesting Inc., reachable at an address in Hangzhou, China, bought the Revue de l’Organisation Responsable from its French publisher, Editions ESKA. On September 4, all fifteen members of the journal’s editorial board resigned.
The journal was founded in 2006 to publish, in its own words, “critical reflection on developments in today’s capitalism.” For nearly two decades it was where scholars of corporate responsibility studied how ownership shapes conduct. It has now handed them a case study in their own subject, and handed everyone else a plain look at what the name on a journal is actually worth.
Read the new fee schedule and the resignation stops looking like a protest and starts looking like a reading of the contract. Under Editions ESKA, the journal ran on subscriptions and authors published at no cost. Under CNBesting, publishing a paper now carries a €1,350 article-processing charge, and an author who withdraws a submitted manuscript “without a legitimate academic or ethical reason” pays a fee of 25 percent of that charge. A journal that collected nothing from authors was converted, in a single transaction, into one that bills €1,350 to publish and taxes you 25 percent to take your own work back.
The co-editors-in-chief, Charlène Arnaud of the University of Toulouse and Lovasoa Ramboarisata of the University of Quebec at Montreal, put the objection on the record in the language of incentives. The new fees, the board wrote, “may go hand in hand with incentives to introduce non-scientific criteria (particularly financial ones),” leaving them unable to “guarantee the journal’s scientific and editorial integrity.” They also learned of the sale too late to matter: the notification “deprived us of the opportunity to engage in a dialogue regarding the future implications.” The owner changed. The board was told after.
Follow what the €360,000 actually bought. Not a printing press, and not a subscriber list. The asset is the name and the indexing behind it, the accumulated standing that lets a paper in this title count on a CV, in a tenure file, in a grant application. That standing was built by unpaid academics who reviewed and edited for free, and it was sold out from under them by the publisher that held the masthead. A publisher paid per published paper, and paid again when an author pulls one back, keeps a balance sheet that runs against letting authors leave at exactly the moment they most want to. The editors did not allege that CNBesting has done anything to a manuscript. They read the structure and concluded they could no longer stand behind what it would produce.
This is not the first title to be read this way. In a January 2025 study written up by Nature, information scientist Alberto Martín-Martín of the University of Granada and colleagues identified at least 36 legitimate journals that had been acquired by recently formed firms with no track record in publishing, firms that then raised article-processing charges and increased output, often on topics outside a journal’s original scope. “We found at least 36 journals but we think that there may be more,” Martín-Martín said. The titles had previously belonged to established owners: Elsevier, the London house Palgrave Macmillan, Indiana University Northwest, the University of São Paulo. After the pattern surfaced, Scopus delisted all 36 and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles it had indexed. One acquiring firm named in the reporting, Oxbridge Publishing House, carries an Oxford-and-Cambridge resonance in a name connected to neither, and told Nature it is “not a publisher.”
The resignation sits inside a larger count. The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List documents dozens of editorial-board walkouts since 2015, the heaviest single cause being disputes over open-access fees. Recent entries include Statistics and Computing, whose board objected after Springer Nature moved to a $2,990 article-processing charge, and Natural Language Semantics, whose publisher demanded a 25 percent increase in annual output. In 2023, more than forty editors at the neuroscience journal NeuroImage quit rather than keep charging authors $3,450 a paper, calling the profit “unethical and unsustainable.” The people closest to the work keep reaching the same conclusion and leaving.
What the documents establish is narrow and firm: a sale, a price, a fee schedule, fifteen signatures dated September 4, and a documented pattern in which titles bought by inexperienced firms raised fees, expanded output, drifted off-scope, and lost their indexing. What they do not establish is that CNBesting will run this journal into the ground. It has not, and the editors were careful not to say it would. They refused something narrower and harder to wave off: to keep their names on a masthead whose new incentives they had now read.
The badge is not the science
“Peer-reviewed.” “Indexed in Scopus.” Those phrases end arguments. They are waved to settle whether a drug works, whether a chemical is safe, whether a claim about your health deserves your trust. This sale shows the certification for what it also is: an asset with a market price, €360,000 in this case, transferable to whoever will pay and answerable to whoever now owns it. The badge is not the science. It never was.
What remains open is who moves now. Scopus, which still lists the Revue, acted on those other 36 titles only after the damage was visible; whether it revisits this one, now that the board that earned the listing is gone, is not something the record yet answers. Editions ESKA collected €360,000 for a title built on two decades of unpaid scholarly labor and has not explained the sale. CNBesting did not respond to Retraction Watch, and the 25 percent withdrawal fee stands as written. The documents are public. The people who could answer for them have not.
Sources
- Retraction Watch – Editors of French journal on corporate responsibility resign after ownership transfer (Sept 11, 2026)
- Nature – Invasion of the ‘journal snatchers’: the firms that buy science publications and turn them rogue (2025)
- Retraction Watch – Mass Resignations List
- Times Higher Education – Mass resignations from Elsevier journal over ‘unethical’ price hike (NeuroImage, 2023)