Thank you for choosing…

While I was enjoying a recent cross-country flight jammed between the fuselage and a generously proportioned passenger in the middle seat, the pilot came on the intercom and said, “we know you have a choice in airlines, thank you for choosing…”. I found that statement somewhat ironic because through deregulation and consolidation, we actually have fewer choices when we fly today than we did in the past. The same cannot be said for scientific publishing. In contrast to the number of carriers in the airline industry, the number of scientific journals in academic publishing continues to increase. Indeed, the Nature “family” of journals currently includes something like 55 publications, which seems more like a commune than a family to me. Nevertheless, this does mean that authors have more choices when deciding where to submit a manuscript. Of course, not all of those options are appropriate, or even desirable in the case of predatory publishers.

Although it is possible to categorize journals in multiple ways (impact factors, open access options, etc.), one clear dichotomy when considering where to submit a manuscript is the choice between a society-run journal versus a journal produced by a strictly for-profit publisher. Both the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and the British Ecological Society (BES), to name just two of many scientific societies, publish multiple journals through a commercial publisher, in this case John Wiley and Sons, or simply “Wiley”. Indeed, commercial publishers like Wiley currently dominate publishing in the ecological and broader natural sciences. To some degree, the relationship between scientific societies and commercial publishers is symbiotic in that both benefit from the interaction. Wiley makes a profit by marketing the journals and shares some of that revenue with the scientific society; at the same time, societies like ESA use those funds to advance their goals through a variety of activities as diverse as training workshops, awards and honors, or travel grants to attend the annual meeting. In contrast, with purely for-profit journals, like many published by Springer Nature, revenues go to shareholders. This does not mean that these publishers are necessarily bad choices, but in many such cases the motive is profit and the flow of revenue back to the scientific community is limited.

My interest in this topic was recently piqued by an article from a group of early career researchers (Ecol Lett 2024) who argued that the publish-or-perish ethic in research universities has created an unethical publishing system. They based this argument on the perception that academics need to publish in high-impact journals to get (and keep) a job, and many such journals originate from for-profit publishers. The authors likened this to David versus Goliath. However, their own data contradict this perception as they report that “roughly half of recent Assistant Professor hires at North American Doctoral Universities in ecology had published in Science, Nature, or PNAS at the time of hiring”. A different take would be that half of the new Assistant Professors in ecology did not publish in those three journals, two of which are produced by not-for-profit publishers. Also recall that, according to legend, David actually won the battle with Goliath. What these authors did get right, and what I consider to be the far more important and perceptive message in their article, is the recommendation to choose society journals over for-profit publication outlets when possible because of the benefits that scientific societies provide, among other reasons. With that in mind, I want to urge early career researchers to get involved with a relevant scientific society not just for the networking benefits, but to help prioritize how those publication revenues are allocated and used.

I recognize that this editorial will appear to be completely self-serving. Guilty as charged. I have been an Editor-in-Chief of two different journals published by scientific societies. Furthermore, I am also guilty of coauthoring articles in journals published by for-profit publishers in part because many of my international collaborators are under tremendous pressure to publish in well-known, high-impact journals. Decades ago, I was part of a site visit team evaluating a Long Term Ecological Research program where the principal investigator (PI) frequently “skimmed the cream” with the intent to publish select findings in Science and Nature. In response to some rather odd pushback from the site review team about doing so, the PI responded, “Cream tastes pretty good”. It does. I get it. But from another perspective, I think a lot of time is wasted by authors as they chase after a premier impact factor, with their manuscript pinballing from one journal to the next until finally settling on a really good journal published by a scientific society like ESA or BES. Perhaps in the future maybe society journal editors need to say “we know you have a choice in publishing, thank you for choosing…”. We certainly need to do a better job of conveying to authors the benefits of submitting manuscripts to highly respected journals published by scientific societies.