Editorial

Abstract

The past year brought yet another record number of submissions to the digital doortstep of Ecological Applications: 686 manuscripts, an 11.3% increase over calendar year 2005. Of the final decisions made by our Editorial Board in 2006, 28% were acceptances, a slight increase over the previous year. The new submissions continue to reflect increasing interest in ecological problem solving, and we are pleased to see submissions in areas of ecology not previously heavily represented in the journal. In response to the increase in submissions and to avoid penalizing either the journal's traditional areas of excellence or the emerging areas relative to each other, the journal requested an increased page budget from the ESA. Over the past year, we have published larger issues (some with more than 400 pages). Beginning this year, we are increasing the number of issues to eight per year. The new issue schedule will mean that papers can appear in print and be posted online sooner after acceptance. We have made dramatic progress over the past few years in decreasing the time to publication (as is evident from the manuscript histories printed as footnotes to each published paper). It is increasingly common to see papers submitted as regular articles published within a year of submission. The backlog of accepted papers awaiting publication is essentially a thing of the past, thanks primarily to the increased page budget. There have also been payoffs resulting from the efforts to encourage authors to submit more concise papers as Communications, as well as the increasing use of Ecological Archives for digital publication of information not integral to accepted papers. Shorter papers can be reviewed, revised, and copy-edited more quickly than the standard articles of the past. In addition, we can publish more of them in a given issue, while still keeping within the page budget. ESA journals are international in both scope and authorship. Only about half of the corresponding authors of submitted manuscripts reside in the United States, and 39% are from countries where English is not the official or principal language. At the “What Editors Want” session organized by ESA's Student Section for the 2005 ESA meeting in Montreal, the journal editors were asked to establish a mechanism for assisting authors whose native language is not English in preparing manuscripts for submission to our journals. The Governing Board enthusiastically endorsed this idea, and so we established an online Bulletin Board at http://www.esa.org/authorhelp/ where individuals can express their willingness to help. We are very pleased to see that roughly 70 individuals have volunteered their services. We thank them for their willingness to help ensure that our journals will serve the international ecological community and that language will not be a barrier to publication of the very best ecological science in our journal. We are grateful that so many ESA members are willing to devote their expertise and valuable time to helping us achieve this goal. We want to remind our authors of the establishment of ESA's official Data Registry at http://data.esa.org. The editors strongly encourage the registration of data sets associated with manuscripts submitted to ESA journals. Links to the Data Registry from the Instructions to Authors and in the acceptance letters from the Editorial Board members should facilitate the registration of data by our authors. Our hope is that the Data Registry will serve as a mechanism for “data discovery,” leading to communication (and possibly collaboration) between researchers and to meta-analyses. The first published papers with links to Data Registry information are appearing in the January and February issues of Ecology. We hope to see an increasing number of papers published with this information in the coming years. Data registration simply serves to announce the existence of data and to provide contact information. By registering data, one does not relinquish rights to research findings. In fact, the registry may serve to establish precedence for ecological studies. Our hope is that the Data Registry will eventually be linked to Data Archives containing the actual data referred to in the registry, and that all data underlying published papers in ESA journals will be readily available for purposes of verification, replication, and meta-analysis.