{"title":"The ESA Editorial Fellowship: Navigating the Publishing Landscape as Early-Career Scientists From the Global South","authors":"Bruno E. Soares, Andrea Paz","doi":"10.1002/bes2.70026","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Publishing is a cornerstone of scientific development and progression of scientific careers, often serving as a currency or benchmark guiding decision-making for academic jobs, grant applications, awards, and more. Maintaining the publishing system is complex. It relies on the quality of submitted manuscripts but also on the collaborative efforts of editors and reviewers. Authors write and submit manuscripts, often without being fully aware of the criteria that will be used by editors to assess the fit of the manuscript for a particular journal. Editors ensure that manuscripts align with the journal's scope, rigorously evaluating their scientific relevance and managing the peer-review process. Then, volunteer reviewers assess the soundness, originality, and coherence of the research, offering constructive feedback to refine the work.</p><p>Despite its central importance to scientific careers, there is a visible gap in specific training for academic publishing, with journals usually lacking training spaces and materials for all the actors involved in the publishing ecosystem (but see British Ecological Society <span>2013</span>). In our experience, while you are trained in academic writing during a PhD, graduate programs often fail to provide training for students in the other activities of academic publishing, instead relying on individual advisors for this experience. Hence, graduate students and early-career researchers are expected to publish, often in well-known outlets and contribute time to the publishing ecosystem (reviewing, even editing), yet there are few formal opportunities to prepare them for this critical part of their career.</p><p>In addition to the lack of training, the fast-paced shifts in academic publishing pose additional challenges for researchers to effectively navigate the publishing landscape without proper training. These changes include an exponential growth of the “pay to publish” system for open access to articles (free to read), AI tools, adoption of double-anonymous review systems, and open science practices. While providing new opportunities for researchers in many instances, these changes require researchers to constantly learn and adapt to this quickly evolving publishing ecosystem (Box 1). Open publishing agreements now allow some researchers to publish “for free” and other agreements provide discounted rates in specific journals, but many researchers are unaware of these opportunities. AI tools that can generate codes for statistical analyses or even text (e.g., ChatGPT) introduce new ethical challenges, which are being addressed by new guidelines from societies and publishers on when and how to use such tools (COPE Council <span>2024</span>). Peer-review models have also shifted, with discussions surrounding review type (e.g., single-anonymous or double-anonymous; Cássia-Silva et al. <span>2023</span>; Fox et al. <span>2023</span>) igniting debate on how to balance scientific rigor, fairness, and accountability. Open science practices are encouraging greater transparency by mandating data and code sharing, as well as changing publishing timelines and accessibility by allowing researchers to share early versions of their work in preprint platforms. These changes reflect the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of publishing, underscoring the urgency of specific training opportunities, especially when they are happening in an already complex system characterized by various socioeconomic barriers.</p><p>Barriers in publishing continue to disproportionately affect authors from the Global South (Fontúrbel and Vizentin-Bugoni <span>2021</span>, Fox et al. <span>2023</span>). Unequal access to training and information (often only available in English) combined with language barriers and limited research funding can result in biased peer review and lower visibility (Ramírez-Castañeda <span>2020</span>, Fontúrbel and Vizentin-Bugoni <span>2021</span>, Fox et al. <span>2023</span>, Naidu et al. <span>2024</span>). Differences in writing conventions, such as the overuse of geographic markers, might unintentionally reduce the perceived scope of Global South papers (Nakamura et al. <span>2023</span>). Furthermore, most high-impact journals are based in the Global North, reinforcing systemic inequities and promoting some ways of knowledge production (Salager-Meyer <span>2008</span>, Bol et al. <span>2023</span>) that might privilege temperate-zone ecology over tropical regions (why is ecology from the temperate regions “ecology,” and ecology from the tropical regions “tropical ecology”?; Soares et al. <span>2023</span>) and foster a narrow perception of global relevance.</p><p>Although some journals have made efforts to deal with biases such as transitioning to double-anonymous reviewing or open reviews and/or allowing abstracts written in different languages, there is still much to be done (Ramírez-Castañeda <span>2020</span>, Amano et al. <span>2023</span>). Society journals are in a strategic position to implement better policies for their journals. For example, they can leverage AI technology to improve text readability and translations, provide space for non-English abstracts (or manuscript translations), encourage multilingual dissemination, and provide mentorship and financial support for improving English skills (Amano et al. <span>2023</span>, Fair et al. <span>2024</span>).</p><p>The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has been pushing forward several actions and programs to improve the publishing ecosystem in biodiversity science. For example, the ESA provides its members one free open access publication per year in one of their hybrid journals, but few members take advantage of this benefit to support the open science mission. The ESA journals also allow joint reviews, enabling researchers to mentor early-career researchers in reviewing scientific articles and collaborate with the publishing landscape through mentoring. ESA also organizes several opportunities for learning academic publishing, including written materials (Harley et al. <span>2004</span>) and several sessions during the society's annual meeting. Finally, in 2024, ESA launched its first edition of the Editorial Fellowship inviting early-career researchers to join their editorial team for a two-year fellowship for leadership training and giving them/us the possibility to pursue editorial projects. The Editor-in-Chiefs of the ESA journals also provide mentorship for the editorial fellows on the publishing ecosystem and the fellows' projects tackling editorial issues.</p><p>As ESA Editorial Fellows and Latin American researchers living and working in the Global North, we understand the critical importance of addressing the challenges faced by early-career researchers, especially those situated in the Global South, in navigating the publishing landscape. We recognize how our privileged educational background and lived experiences in Latin America, summed with our work experience in the Global North, might shape our perspectives, pushing us to renegotiate our identities as we move between places, majority vs. minority population, and career stages (Echeverri et al. <span>2022</span>). Nonetheless, we believe this specific positionality offers a unique opportunity to bridge the gaps between regional scientific communities and a more global science. Over the next 2 years, we aim to address three main areas that tackle the issues we perceive in the publishing landscape. First, we seek to better understand how language biases influence academic publishing and their specific impact on the publications in ESA journals. Second, we expect to provide training opportunities for publishing, with a special emphasis on supporting researchers from the Global South and early-career researchers. Finally, we expect to contribute to improving the shared benefits of open code and data by helping to establish clearer guidelines and good practices that balance transparency with equity and respect for sensitive data.</p><p>In summary, we expect to meaningfully contribute to the accessibility of academic publishing, tackling long-standing issues. We understand that true equality is a long way ahead and will take generations of ESA scholars to address this. We hope to provide information for ESA to tackle global inequality in academic publishing. For this, we will work to publicize and provide training on some of the ESA programs and tools presented here. We will focus on developing training materials and mentoring targeted toward the Global South and on testing the effect of some of these interventions in making the publishing ecosystem more inclusive.</p><p>We declare no conflicts of interest.</p><p>We did not collect any data for this manuscript.</p>","PeriodicalId":93418,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America","volume":"106 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bes2.70026","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bes2.70026","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Publishing is a cornerstone of scientific development and progression of scientific careers, often serving as a currency or benchmark guiding decision-making for academic jobs, grant applications, awards, and more. Maintaining the publishing system is complex. It relies on the quality of submitted manuscripts but also on the collaborative efforts of editors and reviewers. Authors write and submit manuscripts, often without being fully aware of the criteria that will be used by editors to assess the fit of the manuscript for a particular journal. Editors ensure that manuscripts align with the journal's scope, rigorously evaluating their scientific relevance and managing the peer-review process. Then, volunteer reviewers assess the soundness, originality, and coherence of the research, offering constructive feedback to refine the work.
Despite its central importance to scientific careers, there is a visible gap in specific training for academic publishing, with journals usually lacking training spaces and materials for all the actors involved in the publishing ecosystem (but see British Ecological Society 2013). In our experience, while you are trained in academic writing during a PhD, graduate programs often fail to provide training for students in the other activities of academic publishing, instead relying on individual advisors for this experience. Hence, graduate students and early-career researchers are expected to publish, often in well-known outlets and contribute time to the publishing ecosystem (reviewing, even editing), yet there are few formal opportunities to prepare them for this critical part of their career.
In addition to the lack of training, the fast-paced shifts in academic publishing pose additional challenges for researchers to effectively navigate the publishing landscape without proper training. These changes include an exponential growth of the “pay to publish” system for open access to articles (free to read), AI tools, adoption of double-anonymous review systems, and open science practices. While providing new opportunities for researchers in many instances, these changes require researchers to constantly learn and adapt to this quickly evolving publishing ecosystem (Box 1). Open publishing agreements now allow some researchers to publish “for free” and other agreements provide discounted rates in specific journals, but many researchers are unaware of these opportunities. AI tools that can generate codes for statistical analyses or even text (e.g., ChatGPT) introduce new ethical challenges, which are being addressed by new guidelines from societies and publishers on when and how to use such tools (COPE Council 2024). Peer-review models have also shifted, with discussions surrounding review type (e.g., single-anonymous or double-anonymous; Cássia-Silva et al. 2023; Fox et al. 2023) igniting debate on how to balance scientific rigor, fairness, and accountability. Open science practices are encouraging greater transparency by mandating data and code sharing, as well as changing publishing timelines and accessibility by allowing researchers to share early versions of their work in preprint platforms. These changes reflect the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of publishing, underscoring the urgency of specific training opportunities, especially when they are happening in an already complex system characterized by various socioeconomic barriers.
Barriers in publishing continue to disproportionately affect authors from the Global South (Fontúrbel and Vizentin-Bugoni 2021, Fox et al. 2023). Unequal access to training and information (often only available in English) combined with language barriers and limited research funding can result in biased peer review and lower visibility (Ramírez-Castañeda 2020, Fontúrbel and Vizentin-Bugoni 2021, Fox et al. 2023, Naidu et al. 2024). Differences in writing conventions, such as the overuse of geographic markers, might unintentionally reduce the perceived scope of Global South papers (Nakamura et al. 2023). Furthermore, most high-impact journals are based in the Global North, reinforcing systemic inequities and promoting some ways of knowledge production (Salager-Meyer 2008, Bol et al. 2023) that might privilege temperate-zone ecology over tropical regions (why is ecology from the temperate regions “ecology,” and ecology from the tropical regions “tropical ecology”?; Soares et al. 2023) and foster a narrow perception of global relevance.
Although some journals have made efforts to deal with biases such as transitioning to double-anonymous reviewing or open reviews and/or allowing abstracts written in different languages, there is still much to be done (Ramírez-Castañeda 2020, Amano et al. 2023). Society journals are in a strategic position to implement better policies for their journals. For example, they can leverage AI technology to improve text readability and translations, provide space for non-English abstracts (or manuscript translations), encourage multilingual dissemination, and provide mentorship and financial support for improving English skills (Amano et al. 2023, Fair et al. 2024).
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has been pushing forward several actions and programs to improve the publishing ecosystem in biodiversity science. For example, the ESA provides its members one free open access publication per year in one of their hybrid journals, but few members take advantage of this benefit to support the open science mission. The ESA journals also allow joint reviews, enabling researchers to mentor early-career researchers in reviewing scientific articles and collaborate with the publishing landscape through mentoring. ESA also organizes several opportunities for learning academic publishing, including written materials (Harley et al. 2004) and several sessions during the society's annual meeting. Finally, in 2024, ESA launched its first edition of the Editorial Fellowship inviting early-career researchers to join their editorial team for a two-year fellowship for leadership training and giving them/us the possibility to pursue editorial projects. The Editor-in-Chiefs of the ESA journals also provide mentorship for the editorial fellows on the publishing ecosystem and the fellows' projects tackling editorial issues.
As ESA Editorial Fellows and Latin American researchers living and working in the Global North, we understand the critical importance of addressing the challenges faced by early-career researchers, especially those situated in the Global South, in navigating the publishing landscape. We recognize how our privileged educational background and lived experiences in Latin America, summed with our work experience in the Global North, might shape our perspectives, pushing us to renegotiate our identities as we move between places, majority vs. minority population, and career stages (Echeverri et al. 2022). Nonetheless, we believe this specific positionality offers a unique opportunity to bridge the gaps between regional scientific communities and a more global science. Over the next 2 years, we aim to address three main areas that tackle the issues we perceive in the publishing landscape. First, we seek to better understand how language biases influence academic publishing and their specific impact on the publications in ESA journals. Second, we expect to provide training opportunities for publishing, with a special emphasis on supporting researchers from the Global South and early-career researchers. Finally, we expect to contribute to improving the shared benefits of open code and data by helping to establish clearer guidelines and good practices that balance transparency with equity and respect for sensitive data.
In summary, we expect to meaningfully contribute to the accessibility of academic publishing, tackling long-standing issues. We understand that true equality is a long way ahead and will take generations of ESA scholars to address this. We hope to provide information for ESA to tackle global inequality in academic publishing. For this, we will work to publicize and provide training on some of the ESA programs and tools presented here. We will focus on developing training materials and mentoring targeted toward the Global South and on testing the effect of some of these interventions in making the publishing ecosystem more inclusive.
例如,他们可以利用人工智能技术来提高文本可读性和翻译,为非英语摘要(或手稿翻译)提供空间,鼓励多语言传播,并为提高英语技能提供指导和经济支持(Amano et al. 2023, Fair et al. 2024)。美国生态学会(ESA)一直在推动一些行动和计划,以改善生物多样性科学的出版生态系统。例如,欧空局每年在其混合期刊上为其成员提供一份免费的开放获取出版物,但很少有成员利用这一好处来支持开放科学任务。ESA期刊还允许联合评审,使研究人员能够指导早期职业研究人员审查科学文章,并通过指导与出版界合作。ESA还组织了一些学习学术出版的机会,包括书面材料(Harley et al. 2004)和学会年会期间的几次会议。最后,在2024年,欧空局推出了第一版编辑奖学金,邀请早期职业研究人员加入他们的编辑团队,获得为期两年的领导力培训奖学金,并为他们/我们提供从事编辑项目的可能性。欧空局期刊的主编还就出版生态系统和研究员处理编辑问题的项目为编辑研究员提供指导。作为生活和工作在全球北方的ESA编辑研究员和拉丁美洲研究人员,我们理解解决早期职业研究人员面临的挑战的重要性,特别是那些位于全球南方的研究人员,在导航出版环境中。我们认识到,我们在拉丁美洲的特殊教育背景和生活经历,加上我们在全球北方的工作经历,可能会塑造我们的观点,促使我们在不同地方、多数人口与少数人口以及职业阶段之间移动时重新协商我们的身份(Echeverri et al. 2022)。尽管如此,我们认为这种特殊的位置提供了一个独特的机会,可以弥合区域科学界和更全球化的科学界之间的差距。在接下来的两年里,我们的目标是解决三个主要领域的问题,以解决我们在出版领域所遇到的问题。首先,我们试图更好地了解语言偏见如何影响学术出版及其对ESA期刊出版物的具体影响。第二,我们期望为出版提供培训机会,特别强调支持来自全球南方的研究人员和职业生涯早期的研究人员。最后,我们希望通过帮助建立更清晰的指导方针和良好实践来平衡透明度与公平以及对敏感数据的尊重,从而为改善开放代码和数据的共享利益做出贡献。总之,我们希望为学术出版的可访问性做出有意义的贡献,解决长期存在的问题。我们明白,真正的平等还有很长的路要走,需要几代欧空局学者来解决这个问题。我们希望为欧空局解决全球学术出版不平等问题提供信息。为此,我们将努力宣传和提供这里介绍的一些欧空局项目和工具的培训。我们将重点开发针对南方国家的培训材料和指导,并测试其中一些干预措施在使出版生态系统更具包容性方面的效果。我们声明没有利益冲突。我们没有为这篇文章收集任何数据。