New innovations for 2018 and beyond.

Abstract

2017 has been a good year for Ecology Letters. We continue to receive large numbers of excellent submissions, we have been able to process them in a thorough, yet speedy, manner, and we remain a top-choice journal for ecologists looking to publish their best work. We are proud of our position in the publishing ecosystem – thanks to our authors, readers, editorial board and editorial support team for helping us achieve this. The publishing landscape continues to change, and Ecology Letters is innovating to maintain its position as a leading journal that ecologists want to read, and to publish their work in. To this end, we are introducing a number of exciting developments in 2018. It is our 20th birthday, and throughout the year we will be publishing commissioned Reviews & Synthesis and Ideas & Perspectives articles by leading ecologists. Many of these are on topics that have been highly dynamic in the past 20 years, and contain provocative elements in an attempt to generate discussion. Ecology Letters has always focused on the best ideas in ecology and the best evidence to support those ideas. But, of course, ideas and evidence in science are linked by methods. As research workflows become more complex, the methods themselves are becoming more integrated into the growth of ecological knowledge. For this reason, Ecology Letters will seek to publish a relatively small number of methodological papers that offer the potential to revolutionise our field, in a new ‘Methods’ section. These papers will report on new instrumentation, experimental procedures and statistical models that are expected to catalyse significant breakthroughs across ecology's sub-disciplines. Papers should contain sufficient information to transfer methods to new settings, systems, and research questions. For instance, methods using unique reagents must explain how the new formulation may be acquired; quantitative methods must be accompanied by high quality code. All Methods papers should focus on the method itself, but demonstrate use in a case study. Methods papers will have the same formatting and length limits as our regular Letters submissions, but the review criteria will be based more on the novelty and importance of the method, rather than conceptual novelty. We are now open to submission of methods papers, and we look forward to receiving your manuscripts. We are also looking to publish more evolution-focused papers, as long as they have a strong ecological element. In recent years there has been less separation between ecology and evolution, and we have noticed a significant increase in evolutionary themed papers being submitted. Given this, and that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’ (Dobzhansky) – a statement that is undoubtedly true for ecology – we have decided that widening our scope to include more papers that have a strong evolutionary focus along with ecological elements is necessary to keep our journal current. As part of this drive to appeal to evolutionary biologists, we will be holding our 20th birthday party at the Joint Congress in Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier in August 2018, when we will start commissioning evolution-themed papers for a special issue. We hope to see many of our authors and readers at this meeting. Finally, the journal exists for the benefit of the ecological community. We would consequently be delighted to hear of any suggestions you may have for ways in which we could improve it. Please feel free to email any of the editors, or the Montpellier office. We wish you all a wonderful 2018.