Editorial.

Abstract

2017 was the second full year of the partnership between the Ecological Society of America and publisher John Wiley & Sons. The most exciting improvement related to the partnership has been the introduction of Early View in late 2016. For Ecology, this has reduced by half the average time from acceptance to publication to 2.5 months, down from 5 months in 2015. Early View articles are fully copy-edited and typeset and are the versions of record. Rather than needing to wait for an issue, articles are now published in Early View as soon as they are ready. With the first issue of 2018, we are no longer publishing hard copies of the journal. While we sympathize with some of our loyal readers who miss the printed copy, it was a step we needed to take to be competitive and on a firm financial footing. Print readership has dramatically reduced and is no longer sustainable. For the Ecological Society, it's a meaningful move to save trees by abandoning print. We hope that the technologies now available to make the reading experience online more adaptable to diverse readers’ needs will ease this transition. We continue to make articles available in the typeset PDF format, as well as HTML, so that those who prefer to print out an article can still do so in the traditional format. The 1,435 papers submitted to Ecology in 2017 fluctuated by only a few percent compared to previous years. The 23% acceptance rate at Ecology remains essentially unchanged. Average time for authors to receive a decision on a manuscript sent out for peer review has been reduced by about a week from 2016 to 64 days in 2017. The Associate Editors-in-Chief (Nicholas Gotelli and Joseph Yavitt) assist me (the Editor-in-Chief) in looking at every submitted manuscript to make a determination on whether to assign to a Subject Matter Editor. Manuscripts that do not fit our current objectives within a subject area are given a decision within about a week. Two-thirds of these have been offered the option for a direct transfer to Ecosphere. Others that we do not find suitable for ESA journals are freed up to submit elsewhere. Of those offered transfer at this stage, 19% opted to transfer and 37 of these transferred manuscripts were ultimately published in Ecosphere following review. Ecosphere was launched in 2010, in part, so that many promising papers submitted to Ecology and the other ESA journals could be offered a similar quality editorial review process and be published quickly, while simplifying the submission process through direct transfer. Ecosphere has continued to grow every year, and for the first time in 2017 has surpassed Ecology in publishing more papers than any other ESA journal. The likelihood of acceptance at Ecosphere radically increases for those manuscripts that have undergone the peer review process at Ecology or one of the other ESA journals and are then invited for transfer to Ecosphere following revision. The Subject Matter Editors may offer this invitation themselves when a paper shows great promise and should be published, but perhaps does not have the level of novelty expected for Ecology papers. The Editor-in-Chief of Ecosphere, Debra Peters, also looks at manuscripts that do not make the cut at Ecology, where only a limited number of papers can be published, and offers the most promising an invitation to transfer. Authors who accept the invitation to transfer at this stage are given time to revise their manuscripts in line with the recommendations of the reviewers and editor, and 98% of them have been accepted within a week of submitting the revised manuscript to Ecosphere, with 79 such transferred manuscripts published in 2017. The time to publication at Ecosphere has been even faster than for Ecology; papers in Ecosphere published within 2 months from acceptance on average in 2017, and many within one month of acceptance. In a time of increasing concern in the scientific community around the peer review process and the difficulty of finding qualified and willing reviewers, Ecology continues to conduct a high-quality process. Peer review is by nature a tenuous process built upon the good will of reviewers and Subject Matter Editors who volunteer their services in the interests of advancing science. Reviewers are most always authors as well, and can benefit in the act of reviewing to improve their own writing and presentation of results. In 2017, 1,349 individuals contributed a total of 1,721 reviews. Next, 137 Subject Matter Editors examined these reviews and made decisions on manuscripts based not on averaging the review recommendations, but bringing in their own expertise and judgment to make a determination that takes into primary consideration the scope and mission of the journal. On average, we had to ask four individuals to review in order to get two qualified reviewers per manuscript. About half submitted their reviews within the requested three weeks. We are extremely grateful for their service and acknowledge them in an annual list. See: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.2072/full From time to time, a reviewer asks to involve a graduate student, postdoc, or occasionally a graduate seminar in the review. We enthusiastically endorse mentoring of the next generation of reviewers. In such cases, we generally sign up both parties as official reviewers for our records, and list both in our annual list of reviewers, though both can submit the same review. We encourage more professors and others to enlist the aid of their subordinates, after consultation with the staff or Subject Matter Editor, so as to give the early-career scientist an intimate and invaluable introduction to the peer review process. Ecology continues to highlight Reports, which owing to their shorter length and purposeful fast-tracking by staff, proceed more quickly through every stage from submission to publication. Ten percent of papers published by Ecology in 2017 were Reports and these were published on average within four months of submission and within two months of acceptance. Reports appear prominently at the beginning of each issue, and more importantly all Reports are freely available, which further enhances visibility. The ISI Journal Citation Report lists Ecology with more than 58,000 cumulative citations in 2016, which is first by over 14,000 among journals in the field. The cited half-life of Ecology papers is greater than 10 years. Ecology is ranked fourth among the top 20 publications in ecology according to the h-index of Google Scholar metrics. The Journal Impact Factor, according to ISI, was 4.809 in 2016, ranking 20 out of 153 ecology journals. We do caution authors, as well as funding agencies and governments, to take such metrics with a grain of salt in context with what they actually measure. Although the Ecological Society of America has not taken a formal position at this point, we are sympathetic to the goals of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, known as DORA, and do not believe that journal impact factors and other journal metrics are sufficient to judge the quality of an individual scientist's research output. One year ago, Ecology began publishing a new section of short notes in natural history called “The Scientific Naturalist.” We are grateful for the service of super-Editor, John Pastor who handles all these submissions, which amounted to 103 in 2016 and 2017. We published 24 of these papers in 2017, starting with Walter Tschinkel's inaugural contribution last April: “Do Florida harvester ant colonies (Pogonomyrmex badius) have a nest architecture ‘plan’?” Dr. Pastor has enlisted a group of loyal repeat reviewers, as well as new reviewers when the subject area calls for particular expertise. These are concise tales of natural events that report new observations in natural history pointing in new directions for research or challenging existing theories. See Ecology's Author Guidelines for more information and submission instructions. As of mid-February 2018 we have published 36 of these innovative, incisive short pieces, always accompanied by a striking photo elucidating the observation. Virtually all have been well received and the most popular (by Altmetrics scores) include: “Worldwide hemisphere-dependent lean in Cook pines” by J. W. Johns et al., “Faking death to avoid male coercion: extreme sexual conflict resolution in a dragonfly” by R. Khelifa, and “Subterranean flowers of Aspidistra elatior are mainly pollinated by not terrestrial amphipods but fungus gnats” by K. Suetsugu and M. Sueyoshi. Along with the other ESA journals, Ecology was involved in two Virtual Issues in 2017, which were initiated by the British Ecological Society. One was themed on “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” and the other featured articles involving international collaborations. Check out the links at the ESA Journals hub page http://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/ to discover some new connections. Coming up: ESA has been working on a long-term study (from 2004–2017) on the effect of gender on author acceptance rate. We hope to publish these results in the coming months. Stay tuned.