Author friendly
Ecology and Evolution is intended to be a bit different. Our overriding philosophy is to be “author friendly”. We provide a forum for authors to present their evidence-based views, as long as they are not factually incorrect (or, you know, wacky). In practice, this means that we allow authors to disagree with reviewers but we expect them to acknowledge and address disagreements in the manuscript. We think this will lead to dialogues within the research community. Impact comes in many forms. We are not chasing an Impact Factor; we are looking to have research read and commented upon.
Looking for reasons to publish
To implement the journal philosophy, we look for reasons to publish a manuscript rather than looking for reasons to reject. We do not have a target for rejections and there is no page limit for a manuscript, or for an issue of the journal. There is no curve. But just like class marks, there will always be some that do not pass. However, we don’t have to work to make sure there are papers rejected.
Broad scope
Journals typically reject papers that do not fall within the scope of the journal. Ecology and Evolution is intentionally very broad. We accept descriptive studies. We accept work that is preliminary. We accept new opinions and ideas. Any research in ecology, evolution, or at the interface is acceptable. We do not distinguish between subfields of ecology or evolution – all are welcome.
Making use of reviews from other journals
The reviewer community is under increasing stress. One reason for this is that many papers found by reviewers to be good, scientifically sound research are rejected from ‘selective’ journals due to a perceived lack of ‘novelty’ or ‘impact’. This duplication of peer review wastes the time and efforts of both authors and reviewers and delays the community being able to read and make use of this research.
To help reduce this problem, Ecology and Evolution will consider papers referred to us by the Editors of other Wiley-Blackwell journals that are participating in the Manuscript Transfer Program. A full list available here.
Open access and copyright
All articles published by Ecology and Evolution are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. All Ecology and Evolution articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
For more information on the journal Ecology and Evolution, please follow this link
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