Like a rolling stone: the dynamic world of animal ecology publishing

Abstract

It has been another successful and busy year at Journal of Animal Ecology, with a number of new initiatives and an increase in Journal activity, with total submissions increasing by 13% over the last year, the number of open access papers increasing to an all-time high, and our impact factor increasing to 4Á827. We also welcomed in 12 new Associate Editors and said goodbye to eight others. We would like to thank them all for their dedicated service to the Journal, but reserve special thanks to Simon Butler, Karl Cottenie, Simon Verhulst and Andy White, who left this year after each served for the maximum 9-year term. We never like to say goodbye to excellent AEs, but this is a necessary cost in our attempts to refresh the Editorial Board and to allow us to increase its diversity. New initiativesOver the past 12 months, Journal of Animal Ecology has launched two brand new ventures. The first aims to champion work by early career researchers by encouraging them as lead authors of Review and Synthesis articles. We opened a call for paper proposals earlier this year and were delighted with both the quality and quantity (over 50) of those that we received -there is clearly a large pool of excellent young animal ecologists out there and we are pleased to be able to provide them with a new avenue for showcasing their talent. The successful applicants will be submitting their manuscripts over the next few months and we will announce the winner in mid-2017. We will continue to award the Elton Prize for the best standard paper published in Journal of Animal Ecology by an early career researcher. The 2016 award will not be chosen until the spring of this year, but the 2015 Elton Prize winner was: Jonathan Pruitt (2015), for his paper (co-authored with Andreas Modlmeier) called 'Animal personality in a foundation species drives community divergence and collapse in the wild'. The quality of submissions to the competition was extremely high, as always, but Jonathan's paper on spider personalities stood out for its genuine novelty and creativity.Our second new initiative is a development to our Special Features. One of their key roles is to highlight important areas in animal ecology that are emerging and/or undergoing rapid development, and we want to continue to support this. Previous Special Features have been proposed by a small team of authors who put forward a selection of papers from their network of collaborators to cover a topic. We were interested in trying to open up this process to a broader range of individuals who perhaps take different, or even contrary, viewpoints. To this end, we decided to trial an 'open call' in which we invite potential authors from across emerging fields to contribute. This is not a new concept, and it appears to work successfully at other journals that have tried it, but it is new to us and we are keen to see how it works out. We will still continue to be receptive to fully formed teams of authors who wish to suggest potential Special Feature topics, but we do feel that this new approach ...

Telomere dynamics in wild banded mongooses: Evaluating longitudinal and quasi-longitudinal markers of senescence

“…In our longitudinal dataset, many individuals appeared to show an increase in TL (Fig. S2); moreover, other recent longitudinal studies of wild animals have reported similar within-individual increases in TL over time ( Fairlie et al, 2016 , Spurgin et al, 2017 ). In humans, telomerase is expressed during spermatogenesis, and continuously dividing sperm cells exhibit longer telomeres than somatic cells ( Aston et al, 2012 ).…”

Authors and editors assort on gender and geography in high-rank ecological publications

“…While many of the editorial boards from journals in this study report advances in recruiting women and minorities into their ranks over recent years [ 16 , 19 ], we nonetheless find that women and minorities were still significantly more likely to author published papers than to edit them ( Fig 1 ). Furthermore, minority editorial board members were less-likely to serve as handling editor on publications than their majority peers ( Fig 1 ).…”

“…Even background awareness about editor-author interactions may reduce resulting biases moving forward. The journals studied here have all made efforts in recent years to add diversity to their editorial staffs [ 19 ], and the ecological research culture continues to make great strides to mitigate biases. We hope that this analysis encourages authors to proactively consider recommending editors with gender and institutional features different from their own, especially in cases where those features have limited implications for the science at hand.…”

Sex-specific effects of parasites on telomere dynamics in a short-lived passerine—the blue tit

“…Merogony (asexual reproduction) of Haemoproteus occurs in other tissues, whereas Plasmodium multiplies also in red blood cells leading to their disintegration (Valkiūnas 2005 ; Valkiūnas and Iezhova 2017 ). Blood pathologies induced by parasitaemia are expected to increase demand for new blood cells (Schoenle et al 2017 ), which can be attained through higher number of cellular divisions, possibly leading to pronounced telomere erosion. Due to the differences in life cycles between the haemosporidian parasites, lesser impact of Haemoproteus on blood TL is expected.…”