The Expanding Contributions of Systematic Biology

Abstract

When I became editor of Systematic Biology, my number one priority was not to “break it.” My predecessor, Chris Simon, handed me a journal in great shape, and I rapidly became conscious of the responsibility of editing a journal that takes considerable pride in its reputation as the leading journal in the field. Luckily, the task of being editor is made much less onerous thanks to the efforts of the team of associate editors, the diligence of referees, and in particular the hard work of Debbie Ciszek, our managing editor. The book review section has benefited from David Morrison’s tireless efforts in securing reviews for each issue of the journal. Chris Simon also provided helpful advice as I found my feet, and in her role as chair of the publications committee dealt with two vital tasks, finding the next editor (of whom more below) and negotiating contracts with publishers. The biggest operational change during my tenure was how the journal handled manuscript submissions. When I became editor, Systematic Biology received most of its manuscripts by e-mail. For somebody like myself with a perpetually overflowing and chaotic inbox, this posed a considerable organization challenge (which I largely dealt with by relying on Debbie Ciszek to keep me from forgetting manuscripts). By 2006 we had moved to the widely used Web-based submission tool Manuscript Central. This transition was relatively smooth, largely due to the considerable effort Debbie put into ensuring that Manuscript Central mirrored our existing practice. Although the automated reminders generated by Manuscript Central can seem impersonal and, at times, nagging (it is reminding me of my own tardiness as I write this), it has greatly simplified the editorial process. The inexorable march of the Web has had other impacts on the Society’s public face. In early 2005, I ported the old Web site to the content management system Drupal (http://drupal.org). As a consequence, it is now easier for Society officers to update the site with information about Society matters, jobs, conferences, or publications of interest. In addition, the Web site (http://www.systbiol.org) displays a number of news feeds such as tables of contents from other journals in the field, blogs, and social bookmarking services such as the Nature Publishing Group’s Connotea (http://www.connotea.org). This ensures that the site is constantly updated without requiring human intervention. Although the site essentially runs itself, Ruedi Birenheide has provided invaluable technical support to keep it functioning smoothly. In addition to being a forum for the Society, the Web site also acts as a repository for data sets and supplementary materials for each issue of the journal. Much of the relevant data are deposited in databases such as GenBank and TreeBASE (http://www.treebase. org), but not all of the material associated with a paper is appropriate for those databases. There are specialized databases, such as Morphbank (http://www. morphbank.net/) for images and Morphobank (http:// www.morphobank.geongrid.org/) for morphological data that will be increasingly important, but there is still no home for much of the semistructured data generated by a study (such as Excel spreadsheets of specimens sampled, tables of alternative dates for nodes in trees, or appendices containing mathematical proofs or algorithms). Our Web site does store these, but is vulnerable to the classic problems of persistence (if we reorganize the site, many of the links to the files may change) and findability (we don’t provide an easy means to search for specific files). In the United States, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) (http://www.nescent.org) is sponsoring Digital Repository of Information and Data for Evolution (DRIADE), which aims to provide a persistent repository for data underlying published studies in evolutionary biology. Such a repository would help ensure that data supporting a study are not lost. The issue of data availability was one that I raised in my introductory editorial at the start of my tenure as editor (Simon and Page, 2005). Looking over that essay makes me shudder a little—some of the issues raised there are still with us, notably Open Access. Journals such as PLoS Biology, PLoS One, and the BMC journals are flourishing and attracting a growing number of authors. Yet for a society journal such as ours, Open Access is just beginning. In addition to the vital core of high-quality empirical and theoretical papers that make Systematic Biology a “must read” journal for systematists, the journal has