It’s 25 years this month since the publication of the first issue of Ecology Letters. I remember this as the culmination of more than a year of preparation, including assembling the new editorial board, establishing the workflow for the journal, and most of all, sending hundreds of email invites to colleagues to consider submitting a paper to the journal. Publication of Volume 1, Number 1 with its 14 articles was an achievement (and my only privileges at the journal over my tenure as Editor in Chief were contributing the Maculinea alcon cover photo, and being privy to fantastic science close-up for the next 11 years), as was lining up articles for the next few bimonthly issues, since we needed a constant flow of accepted articles, which in turn required on-time referee reports and author responsiveness to publication decisions. Despite the anxiety in these early days, it all worked out beautifully.
The basis of Ecology Letters came from what was at the time often unreasonably long periods between manuscript submission and publication decisions. All ecologists were aware of this and amongst the many impacts were delays in publication for students and postdocs on the science job market, and the fact that science moves on, meaning that when a decision is made 6 or more months after manuscript submission (as it typically was at the time), the authors have almost forgotten about their own study’s content. This poses both scientific and motivational challenges in conducting revisions should the manuscript still be under consideration by the journal, or should the paper be rejected, starting all over again at another journal. Articles in the 1990s typically took 1 to 2 years between submission and final publication, but those for which authors overshot and submitted to highly competitive journals could easily take several years.
Key to Ecol Lett’s launch was receiving a sufficient flow of manuscript submissions from authors. Most of the positive responders to my initial invites were either colleagues or members of the editorial board. Scientists are wary of new journals and to add to this for Ecol Letts specifically, there must have been ‘something wrong’ with a journal that dared promise rendering publication decisions in at most 6 weeks for their Letter category. In the first months anyway, the journal worked mostly by word of mouth and some of the submitted manuscripts in these early days had been previously rejected by other scientific journals. This situation gradually changed to the point where in the early 2000s the submission pipeline was growing without need for invitations. Other journals saw how Ecol Letts was changing the publication landscape and took our model on-board to put a greater emphasis on making publication decisions with shorter delays. As I’ve described in a separate blog post and in more detail in my book on writing and publishing scientific papers, running a good ship requires organization, and organization is only possible if all hands are on-board. The secret to our success however was not simply good editorial office organization. Success required a change in the mindset of the science community, whereby scientists acting as reviewers needed to give greater priority to conducting manuscript reviews in weeks rather than months.
Think about it. The average manuscript takes several hours to review. Then anywhere from tens of minutes to a couple of hours is necessary for the handling editor to arbitrate the external reviews. Finally, the same time commitment applies to the Editor in Chief to render the decision. So, if everything was top priority for everyone and all the steps were coordinated, then theoretically, a submitted manuscript sent for full peer review could have a publication decision within 24 hours! What could possibly be going on for journals taking 6 months or more from submission to decision? Answer: >99% dead-time on web-servers. I’m certainly not saying that scientists should be on emergency-call 24/7 to do authors and journals favors and feel they are driving the betterment of science. But the reverse is just as unacceptable. Prior to the 2000s, the most responsible ecological journals and the reviewer community were not prioritizing efficiency in any meaningful way. I say this from experience. I was Editor in Chief of Acta Oecologica from 1995 to 1997 and without any special effort was able to make the majority of first publication decisions within 2 months of manuscript submission. 2 months is a cake-walk if you are well organized and if reviewers cooperate (the latter was the big “if”).
The vast majority of scientists do not have the bird’s eye view of an editor, and so most of the former just scratch their heads trying to imagine what could be going on to explain long delays. In the 1980s and 1990s anyway, each and every mid-career or senior scientist would have experienced unacceptably long delays with some if not the majority of their manuscript submissions. What is ‘acceptable’ depends on the person, but to give you an idea of 2 of mine that no one in their right mind would find acceptable:
· 9 months to review a 3 page note at a major evolution journal (I was told after 6 months that the handling editor was on sabbatical, but that did not seem to faze the journal manager).
· 6 months to desk reject a perspective manuscript on conservation science at a major ecology journal (the reason being that the journal editor found the paper too conservation-oriented).
Evidently, people have lives, people have problems and the priority given to manuscript handing is up to the person reviewing the manuscript. But there is a difference between being professionally busy and having important personal or family health issues. It is not the author’s business which might be responsible for delays, and as such, trust is given to journal management that they do their best to deal with delays, depending on the reasons.
Having been Editor in Chief of two journals and handled over 8000 manuscripts, I have come to think that the main reason for reviewer tardiness was being busy with other things and simply viewing an agreed 3-week period to render a review as something that few abide by anyway, so why do anything different? Perhaps I’m off on the tail of the distribution, but I do believe what was lacking then[1] was professional empathy. True, it would be disheveling to receive a decision letter with 3 competent reviews after only 48 hours post-submission. But for all the possible reasons that a reviewer might be non-responsive and the journal not equipped to deal with the situation, I wonder whether at some basic level routinely "busy" people factor-in personal responsibility to authors. I realize that my view is harsh, and of course reviewers-and-editorial-offices-as-people encounter unforeseen challenges, meaning they sometimes cannot meet deadlines. But what I am talking about here is different. It’s the norm whereby people give insufficient priority to the publication process.
My unsatisfactory experiences and those shared by colleagues were indeed the basis for making responsible editorial service official with Ecology Letters. The journal’s main objectives were (1) editorial quality, (2) scientific importance (quality and novelty), and (3) service to authors and the larger community. We knew from the start that the first and third of these would attract the second. With published scientific importance came more manuscripts and a higher percentage of important manuscripts. This generated challenges, the main one being that about 40% of our submissions were receiving sufficiently positive peer reviews to contend for publication at any ecology journal, but due to page constraints (in those days, subscribers were promised a total number of journal pages for the following year) we were only accepting about half of these. This is a situation that many journals contend with, that is, where to demarcate acceptance and rejection. The equation is tricky, since the volume of manuscript submissions can be variable and unless a journal creates a backlog (which all do), then the journal can find itself publishing fewer articles than planned, meaning they need to make up for the shortfall in order to achieve the promised number of pages on the year. Making up for the shortfall could mean accepting manuscripts that would not have been accepted had the shortfall not occurred in the first place. So, the solution is to always have a backlog, even if only covering the next to-be-published journal issue. In sum words, there is little point in rejecting excellent manuscripts due to booms in submissions only to encounter a situation where the acceptance bar is significantly lowered due to transitory (and unpredictable) submission bust.
Consider the following hypothetical but realistic example. A submitted manuscript receives three reviews, two are very positive, one negative. The editor handling the manuscript then needs to look at the information provided by each reviewer – both their comments for authors and confidential comments for the editor. Reviews never completely coincide, which is part of the reason for soliciting more two or more. The editor’s duty then is to see how the science meets the objectives of the journal, whether proposed revisions are achievable and how revisions are likely to change the manuscript and, especially, how a revised and acceptable manuscript would compare with other concurrent manuscripts[2]. Actual acceptance ultimately comes down to being significantly beyond just acceptable. Editors make the decisions based on many complex factors and, as such, subjectivity is unavoidable. Moreover, at least for a young, rising journal, there are other extraneous factors that are taken into account. Important among them is changes in the flow of manuscript submissions. That is, as a journal attracts increasing numbers of submissions, the journal either expands the number of papers accepted (which might have to wait until the following year when the new page extent is determined by the publisher) and/or rejects some papers that would have been published in the past. This is especially true if, in addition to manuscript number, average manuscript quality is also increasing. During my tenure, Ecology Letters both expanded publication numbers from year to year and raised the bar for manuscript acceptance. At the time I stepped-down as Editor in Chief in December 2008, we published 1375 pages on that year and accepted 10% of submissions.
Thanks to a committed editorial board and the support of Blackwell Science Publishing and later Wiley Publishing, their office in Paris, and the French Centre de Recherche Scientifique, we were able to achieve our promise of 100% on-time publication decisions in early 2001 and the 100% remained until I stepped-down as Editor in Chief in January 2009. Our decision times were 4 to 8 weeks depending on manuscript type, and given the commitment of our editorial board and external reviewers, we were confident that these decisions met the highest standards practiced by established journals in the ecological sciences. The journal went from strength to strength after I stepped down, led successively by EiC’s Marcel Holyoak, Tim Coulson and Peter Thrall, with the journal oversight of Managing Editors Chantal Cosquer, Christelle Blee, Francine Roussel and Nathalie Espuno.
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Ecology Letters is in many ways my baby and, yes, I do get a kick out of seeing its articles referenced in the scientific literature and cited in seminars. I think of the science that might have been presented differently, with less exposure, had it not been for the journal and, arguably, the science that would not have happened at all. I think of the many thank yous from authors for publishing their work rapidly, but also - surprisingly - colleagues who having their manuscript rejected nevertheless said they preferred rapid rejection to interminable delays in getting a manuscript accepted. I also think of the careers that Ecol Letts helped make. True, scientists ultimately make their own careers, but they are evaluated based on norms, and one of these is journal prestige and journal impact factor. To this, in 1998 there was no half-way house between journals like Nature and Science and journals in the ecological and evolutionary sciences. Ecology Letters filled this gap and by the mid-2000s its prestige was such that it was publishing work close to the realm of Nature and Science. Articles in vitrine journals attract more attention as do the authors on those articles[3].
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Ecology Letters came at just the right time. There was a need for greater responsibility to authors and to the scientific community, but also emerging technological opportunities that facilitated our rapid decision promise. In 1999 we shifted from 100% snail mail to a computer-based software system and manually-generated emails. During this period, our on-time decision rates increased from about 50% to 90%. In 2000 we moved to an online management system, which greatly reduced the time spent administering manuscripts and brought us up to 100% on-time decisions in early 2001. Being on-time means being on-the-ball, but what authors, reviewers and the scientific community at large don’t see, is the work required to make this happen. The total number of emails sent by editors, authors, reviewers, and the editorial office almost invariably exceeded 50 for each reviewed manuscript and up to 100 emails for those manuscripts finally published.
I know what it takes to start a new journal - vision, energy, commitment, implication of academic societies and/or journal publishers. Starting what will become a leading journal is far more challenging today than it was in 1998. The terrain is changing fast and unpredictably. The journal sphere is encountering unprecedented challenges, not the least of which is the fundamental role of publishing in science. Scientist productivity has skyrocketed providing a market for lower-tier and predatory journals, diminishing scientific oversight, and the flooding of the science ecosystem with low-grade and sometimes questionable research. Even when a scientist-as-reader focuses on publications in what various institutions regard as reputable journals, it is increasingly difficult to find the time to read the key papers in one’s research domain. To the extent that scientists do read, they tend to focus on a limited array of research labs and tend to give more weight to articles published in prestigious and high-impact journals. I have written about these and related problems here and here.
Science will unquestionably survive and prosper. Making this happen will require the commitment of publishing platforms, including peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers. That is, people will make this happen, but I have come to the conclusion that we cannot do this alone. Beyond the immense help scientists get from technology, there is the prospect that AI will play an increasingly important role in how science is conducted, evaluated, published and accessed by scientists, and presented to the public.
True, AI presents dangers, two of the main ones being delegating responsibility to platforms when their capabilities are not completely known, and people employing platforms to exploit, manipulate or pollute science. The second of these is particularly preoccupying since these deviations happen even without AI. To the extent that scientific journals serve as gatekeepers, their objective is to determine and promulgate scientific truth and originality. This does not prevent non-gold-standard or less-than-reputable journals from operating. Nor does this stop careless or mal-intentioned authors from seeking publication. Perhaps one day AI could help the gatekeepers and call-out the gatecrashers. But even in an AI-supported world of science, truth and fairness will need to be chaperoned by humans, and this will require consideration and reconsideration of ethics in science, and of science’s and scientists’ place in informing humanity and preserving the biosphere.
Journal editors, data analytics specialists, artificial intelligence experts, evaluation committees and scientists at large need to come together and collectively develop priorities and the means to meet their goals. I’m hopeful that the leading journals will play a prominent role in such collectives to protect and promote science’s fundamentals: curiosity, impartiality, independence, constructive critique, openness and application. This is the best guarantee of success.
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[1] Ever-fewer scientists are accepting to review. In opting out, perhaps the busier / less empathetic among us are in fact more empathetic by not wasting anyone’s time, but nevertheless, arguably more selfish. [2] Authors often wonder why their manuscript with positive reports is rejected. It’s the Editor’s duty to explain why, but obviously the Editor cannot send the author confidential comments by reviewers, nor the evaluations of other competing manuscripts. [3] I say this knowing it will ruffle feathers. Ecology Letters aimed for a niche similar to Nature and Science, that is, stressing novelty and general interest. Ecology Letters also provided an alternative venue to the top ecology and evolution journals meaning that scientists had more choice in selecting a journal corresponding to the authors' desired audience.