Ecological Monographs in the 21st Century

2010-05-16T06:36:00.007-04:00

Well, writing blogs is a lot like writing manuscripts. Sometimes we write a lot, sometimes we go months without writing. With many grant proposals consigned to the dustbin of the past year, I am returning to this blog, perhaps on a more regular basis.

To begin, an updated report on all manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs during the 2009 calendar year.

Ecological Monographs

2010 Annual Report

Aaron M. Ellison, Editor-in-Chief

In calendar year 2009 (January 1 – December 31), 104 manuscripts were submitted to Ecological Monographs. Of these, 53 (51%) were rejected without review, all but five by the Editor-in-Chief. Of the remaining 51 manuscripts, 29 were rejected after peer review, and 22 were eventually accepted for publication. Table 1 summarizes editorial decisions on all manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs during 2009.

Table 1. Status of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs, 1 January – 31 December 2009.

Manuscript status as of 12 May 2010	N	%
Rejected without review by Editor-in-Chief	48	46
Rejected without review by Subject-matter editor (SME)	5	5
Rejected by SME after external review	29	28
In first round of review	0	0
Awaiting revision requested after external review	0	0
Accepted for publication	22	21
Total	104

The median time for decisions was five days for manuscripts rejected without review and 69 days for manuscripts sent out for external peer review (Figure 1.).

Figure 1. Time to first decision (in days) of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs, 1 January – 31 December, 2009.

The time from manuscript acceptance to publication-in-print averaged 272 days (9 months), with a range of 199-305 days. As Ecological Monographs is published quarterly, this means that the lag time from acceptance to publication is 3 issues.

Because the scope and focus of Ecological Monographs is changing (see the Editorial in the Feburary 2009 issue), manuscripts that previously would have been reviewed and published there are now being rejected without review; for about half of these manuscript, (24 of 53 manuscripts [45%] in 2009) authors were encouraged to shorten and refocus their work for submission to either Ecology or Ecological Applications. Again, about half of the authors (14 of 24 [58%] chose to shorten their manuscripts and submit them to Ecology or Ecological Applications. Four of these were rejected without review, eight were rejected following peer review, and two were accepted following peer review.

Table 2. Status of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs in 2009, rejected without review, and subsequently resubmitted to Ecology or Ecological Applications as of May 1, 2010.

	Accepted	In revision	In review	Rejected
Ecology	2	0	0	9
Ecological Applications	0	0	0	3

May 16, 2010

Editor's First Report on Ecological Monographs

2009-07-02T13:07:00.008-04:00

Editing a journal is like making sausage. It probably shouldn't be scrutinized too carefully. But in the spirit of open discussion, here is what's been happening at Ecological Monographs since I took over as Editor-in-Chief in January 2009. This is a verbatim copy of the report submitted to the Ecological Society of America's Council for the ESA's annual meeting to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico the first week of August.

The report begins...

Since taking the editorial helm of Ecological Monographs in January 2009 (de facto beginning November 15, 2008), 56 manuscripts have crossed my desk. As of 30 June 2009, 5 have been accepted, 3 are awaiting revision, and 9 are working their way through their first round of review. The remaining 39 were rejected, most (28) without review. Table 1 summarizes editorial decisions on all manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs in the last 7 months.

Table 1. Status of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs, 15 November 2008 – 30 June 2009.

Manuscript status as of 30 June 2009	N	%
Rejected without review by Editor-in-Chief	25	45
Rejected without review by Subject-matter editor (SME)	3	5
Rejected by SME after external review	11	20
In first round of review	9	16
Revision requested by SME after external review	3	5
Accepted for publication	5	9
Total	56

The median time for decisions was four days for manuscripts rejected without review and 71 days for manuscripts sent out for external peer review (Figure 1.).

Figure 1. Time to first decision (in days) of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs, 15 November 2008 – 30 June 2009.

Because the scope and focus of Ecological Monographs is changing (see the Editorial in the Feburary 2009 issue or if you don't have a subscription to the journal, the instructions to authors), manuscripts that previously would have been reviewed and published there are now being rejected without review; in many cases authors are encouraged to shorten and refocus their work for submission to either Ecology or Ecological Applications. Of the 28 manuscripts submitted in the past 7 months to Ecological Monographs that were rejected without review, 12 were shortened and resubmitted; most of these are still under review (Table 2).

Table 2. Current status of manuscripts submitted to Ecological Monographs, rejected without review, and subsequently resubmitted to Ecology or Ecological Applications.

	Accepted	In revision	In review	Rejected
Ecology	0	2	4	3
Ecological Applications	0	0	3	0

The relatively high rejection rate (Table 1) and the resubmission of papers to Ecology or Ecological Applications (Table 2) rejected by Ecological Monographs was anticipated as the scope and focus of Ecological Monographs shifts. I expect the rejection rate (especially the rate of reject without review decisions) to decline along with the reformatting and resubmission of rejected manuscripts to Ecology and Ecological Applications as potential authors become more aware of the new direction that Ecological Monographs is taking.

Finally, Ecological Monographs is now accepting detailed review papers. As of June 30, two review papers have been accepted for publication; one is scheduled for printing in the November 2009 issue and the other is scheduled for the February 2010 issue.

2009-06-08T09:40:00.008-04:00

New opportunities in electronic publishing

A recent paper by Shotten et al. (PLoS Computational Biology 4: e4803) suggests a number of potential ways to enhance research articles, some of which are applicable to either printed papers or electronic publications and others are applicable only to on-line versions. Some of the most immediately appealing include:

The Supporting Claims Tooltip, which links a citation to actual text in the cited article that provides evidence for the relevance of the citation;
Highlighting of textual terms, especially scientific names of organisms, and hyperlinks to external information sources, such as various classification web-sites or the Encyclopedia of Life;
Direct links to data that coud be immediately used. For example, summary tables or figures could be linked directly to raw data tables, for example those posted in Ecological Archives. Maps and images could be linked to geospatial data that could be manipulated with Google Maps.

Although these three examples all add functionality to electronic versions, some additional markup, for example, of key references, could be done in printed versions as well (as is already done in articles published by Annual Reviews).

Why do I think these are important and useful directions?

We all think that electronic publication and the world-wide-web broaden our intellectual horizons. But in fact, evidence gathered to date suggests the contrary - that electronic publication and more importantly electronic search engines have actually narrowed our intellectual focus (Evans 2008). Tools such as those proposed by Shotton et al. may provide an opportunity to broaden the scope of our science, not narrow it.

What's this blog all about?

2009-03-30T14:06:00.004-04:00

Since taking the helm of Ecological Monographs in January 2009, I've received a number of e-mails encouraging me to "bring the journal into the 21st century." I'm not sure what this means, although one might infer from the various missives that Ecological Monographs is somehow carrying the torch for ecological science in the pre-electronic (or at least the pre-Twitter) age. But I, and my colleagues who edit and produce the other ESA journals, are ready to listen. We want to know what you, our fellow manuscript writers, reviewers, and readers, want to see in Ecological Monographs, and how it can best evolve to maintain its pre-eminent standing in the field.

So please participate in this on-line experiment. Send in your ideas, respond to others', and help chart the future direction of Ecological Monographs.