This past year was my first full year as the Editor of Copeia. I am grateful to work with a tremendous group of associate editors and a phenomenal editorial office. The associate editors of Copeia are all excellent scientists who provide a critical service to the Society and Copeia. I thank them for continuing to set high standards for our journal. I am sad to report that Dr. Karen Martin will be stepping down as an Associate Editor for Physiology and Physiological Ecology after ten years. She was a fantastic Associate Editor, and I thank her for her many years of dedicated service. I also want to take this opportunity to welcome Dr. Mia Andreani as a new Ecology and Ethology Associate Editor.
I continue to work with long-time production editor Katie Smith who is in her 15th year with Copeia, and now Matt Girard has replaced me as the illustration editor. We have transitioned and streamlined our workflow using a combination of Slack and Dropbox to efficiently communicate and share files among the members of the editorial office. Katie and Matt are extremely skilled and handle the majority of work on Copeia after manuscripts are edited and accepted. It is a pleasure to work with Katie, Matt, all of the associate editors, and the staff at Allen Press.
I want to take this opportunity to thank authors who submit their manuscripts to Copeia. The Society wants to support the research of its members, and we care about the quality of our product. Copeia benefits tremendously from the research of our members, and we want Copeia to be a venue for some of the best work of our Society’s members. As with any journal, our downloads, citations, and scientific and public awareness benefit disproportionately from our highest performing manuscripts. We are grateful when our members choose to publish their best work in Copeia. We also realize how much work is needed to produce a scientific publication, and we are dedicated to ensuring that their science is presented in the best possible light. As such, we have an editorial office that includes a production editor with a master’s degree in biology and over a decade of scientific copyediting experience and an illustration editor who is pursuing a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. The production editor works exclusively for Copeia to ensure that manuscripts are produced efficiently and accurately. The illustration editor ensures that all images are of high quality and works with authors to improve their submitted images.
For many years, the editorial office and associate editors have been making efforts to improve the experience for authors in Copeia. I want to highlight our improvements on two fronts. The first improvement is one of the most desired metrics: a reduction in time from submission to publication. Copeia is happy to report that manuscript review and publication times continue to improve and are competitive with other respected zoological venues. The number of days from manuscript submission to final publication averaged 273 days (often fewer than 200) in 2018. This compares favorably with data from seven years ago when this same process averaged nearly 580 days. The trend can be seen in the image below. This and related critical turnaround-time metrics have more or less continually decreased every year since 2011. There are many reasons for this improvement from online-early publication to the dedication of our editorial staff, reviewers, and publication partners. I hope our proven commitment to continually improving this metric will encourage scientists to submit their best work to Copeia.
Second, I wanted to highlight the improved usage of our free-to-author supplemental website (https://www.copeiajournal.org/supplemental), which is now being used in greater than 20% of our manuscripts. This resource that began in 2016 was chosen to minimize the cost of storing supplemental data for Copeia. We preferred this approach because it allows us allows us to provide this service for free to authors, it ensures that ASIH maintains control of the supplemental information associated with Copeia, and we have used it to add additional benefits to our authors and the greater scientific enterprise. As one of several examples, the editorial office of Copeia now requires tree files for all phylogenetic analyses. The final tree files are stored on the supplemental website for subsequent researchers and uploaded by the editorial office to the ever-growing Open Tree of Life Project (https://tree.opentreeoflife.org).
I remain concerned with the trend of fewer published papers over the last several years. I would like to publish around 800 pages per year in Copeia. It is my hope that some of the changes highlighted below will increase the number of manuscript submissions. To potentially increase the number of quality manuscript submissions, we have implemented a few changes at Copeia. Some of these changes were noted in last year’s report or emailed to the membership in the fall of 2018. I want to highlight three of these changes here that relate to open-access options for authors in Copeia.
(1) Beginning in 2019, Copeia has several new open-access policies ranging from a comparatively inexpensive full "Gold Open Access" option for members to formal permission for "Green Open Access" for the deposition of submitted manuscripts into non-commercial preprint servers such as bioRxiv and post-acceptance digital repositories. Authors can now pay to make their research freely available to all interested parties from both the BioOne (https://bioone.org/journals/copeia) and Allen Press “membership-based” (https://www.asihcopeiaonline.org) journal websites upon publication of their article. Members of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists can make their article fully open access for $500, and non-members can make their article fully open access for $2,500. This option has been available for all of 2019, and approximately 10% of papers have been made open access by the authors. Additionally, Copeia now allows authors to deposit manuscripts in non-commercial preprint servers such as bioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org) and allows authors to deposit their accepted manuscript in non-commercial digital repositories associated with their employers or universities as long as the following conditions are met: 1) the manuscript, tables, figures, and supplemental material are included in manuscript form (i.e., not the type-set proof or final publication), 2) the copyright to the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and year is noted, and 3) the full published citation and DOI are included.
(2) All Copeia authors are given a personalized open-access link to share that provides 50 days of free and open access to their article from the date of publication. This link will take readers directly to the final version of the article and does not require registration or login. This service is provided to help authors share Copeia research with the press and social media without any barriers to access. We believe that this direct link from through the Copeia supplemental website (https://www.copeiajournal.org) that does not require sign-in or verification will facilitate early spread of the manuscript, which should increase downloads and citations of the research. In the first year of this link offering, we had 6,280 downloads of Copeia papers from our direct links. Importantly, these 6,280 downloads did not negatively impact our downloads of articles on our BioOne and Allen Press websites. In fact, both of these sites saw year-over-year download increases for new articles in 2018 (see download statistics below). As noted last year, the downloads were dominated by one paper that was downloaded 3,006 times (2018: 94–119) after being written about by Smithsonian Magazine, but three additional papers were downloaded over 200 times. This open-access link shared by authors and ASIH on social media allowed a freelance writer who did not have had access to Copeia articles behind a paywall to learn and write about this new discovery. We hope these 50-day open-access links will continue to facilitate the writing of popular articles on research published in Copeia.
(3) Copeia will now make ten articles open access each year at no charge. These include the six best papers of the year (https://asih.org/copeia/best-copeia-papers) as well as the most downloaded paper of the year and the most cited paper of the preceding year (one in herpetology and one in ichthyology for each category). The Society hopes that this will encourage authors to submit their best work to Copeia. One week after making the award-winning papers open access in 2018, four of these articles were in the top 20 most-downloaded articles of the previous three months.
Copeia impact factor and download statistics
At the end of 2018, Copeia’s impact factor was 1.220 (2017, 0.980; 2016, 1.144; 2015, 1.034; 2014, 0.901). This score places the journal slightly to the better side of the median of the zoology journals that Copeia is properly compared to. Of the 167 zoology journals that receive an impact factor, Copeia ranked 70th. In last year’s report, Copeia was ranked 86 out of 160. For comparison, we performed better than the median impact factor of zoology journals which was 1.097. With regard to the impact factor, we performed similarly to other herpetological and ichthyological journals: Herpetological Monographs–2.000; Journal of Fish Biology–1.702; Herpetologica–1.013; Journal of Herpetology–0.865; Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters–0.783; Ichthyological Research–0.765.
Although it has not been discussed in previous reports from the Editor, it seems clear that I should begin to collate and provide discussion about the annual downloads of our publications across all four websites: the membership website (“Allen Press”), the BioOne website (“BioOne”), the 50-day open-access website (“Squarespace”), and the JSTOR website (“JSTOR”). As noted above, this was the first year of the Squarespace website, so all of its statistics are exclusive to 2018, but I have gone back and collected data from 2017 to make relevant comparisons for the other three websites. Across all four websites, Copeia had 96,201 downloads of articles in 2018. This compares favorably to 85,414 downloads in 2017. More than half of our downloads are from JSTOR (60,492 downloads in 2018 and 54,824 downloads in 2017). The remaining downloads are from BioOne (25,362 downloads in 2018 and 26,263 downloads in 2017), Squarespace (6,280 downloads in 2018), and Allen Press (4,067 downloads in 2018 and 4,326 downloads in 2017). In addition to total downloads, we can examine in-year downloads. In 2018, we had 12,449 downloads of 2018 Copeia articles (6,280 on Squarespace, 4,844 on BioOne, and 1,325 on Allen Press). These compare favorably to the 5,104 downloads of 2017 Copeia papers in 2017 (3,824 on BioOne and 1,280 on Allen Press). The mean number of downloads per 2018 article in 2018 was 201 (or 100 if the Squarespace downloads are excluded). The compares favorably to the mean number of downloads per 2017 article in 2017, which was 73 (note: There were no Squarespace downloads in 2017.). Nearly half of our 12,449 downloads in 2018 came from our five most downloaded articles of 2018 (6,180 downloads or 49.6%). Three of the top five downloads of 2018 were ichthyological, one was herpetological, and one was a techniques paper that was relevant to herpetology and ichthyology. Of our 12,449 2018 downloads, 64% were ichthyological, 22% were herpetological, and 14% were from the techniques paper noted above that was relevant to herpetology and ichthyology.
A final comparison that can be made about the impact and reach of our publications is the average Altmetric score for our articles. Altmetric scores are based on the company’s algorithm that attempts to summarize and quantify the online activity or reach surrounding scholarly content. With our increased efforts to share our publications through Twitter and with the 50-day open-access link, it is not surprising that our mean and median Altmetric scores would improve in 2018 relative to 2017. In 2018, our mean Altimetric score was 17.6 (0–320) per paper, which is improved over our 2017 mean score of 8.4 (0–162) per paper. As we see with article citations (i.e., impact factors) and downloads, our highest performing papers have a disproportionate impact on our mean Altimetric scores. Given this effect, it is important to note that our median Altimetric scores also more than doubled in 2018 (from 3 in 2017 to 7 in 2018). This suggests that not only high-performing papers, but all Copeia papers, are experiencing higher visibility and activity because of the 50-day open-access link and the social media efforts of Copeia and our authors.
Copeia submissions and articles
There were 265 new and revised submissions in 2018 (9% increase over 2017). Of these, 162 were new submissions (17% increase over 2017). This is an average of 22 new and revised submissions per month (10% increase over 2017). There were 20 in 2017, 20 in 2016, 24 in 2015, and 19 in 2014. In terms of new submissions, June (17 new submissions) was the most active month, while January (9 new submissions) was the slowest month. Of these new submissions, 117 were from the United States and the rest were received as follows from an additional 17 countries: Argentina (1), Australia (2), Brazil (22), Canada (2), China (3), Denmark (1), Ecuador (1), Hong Kong (1), India (4), India (1), Israel (1), Japan (2), Malaysia (1), Mexico (1), Norway (1), Singapore (1), and Thailand (1).
In 2018, 696 pages of Copeia were published across four issues: March (237 pages), July (167 pages), October (170 pages), and December (122 pages). These represent a decrease of 125 pages (i.e., down 15%) from 2017, which had 821 pages. The 2018 volume included 62 research papers (602 pages or 86% of the volume). The remaining pages (14% of the volume) were distributed across two historical perspectives, zero obituaries, eight book reviews, editorial notes and news, instructions to authors, summary of the 2018 annual meeting, award announcements, subject and taxonomic indices of volume 105, and the volume contents of both 105 and 106.
Of the 62 research and review papers published, 34 (54%) were ichthyological, 27 (44%) were herpetological, and one (2%) was a techniques paper relevant to both. For comparative purposes, these statistics for the past several years (% ichthyological/% herpetological) are 53/47 for 2017, 34/65 for 2016, 62/38 for 2015, 53/47 for 2014, and 49/51 for 2013. The proportion of ichthyological vs. herpetological submissions represents which manuscripts make it to acceptance for publication; it is not a goal of the editorial office to balance the taxonomic distribution. Of the 62 research and review papers published, we had 215 authors. We do not ask for demographic information from our authors, but our best estimate of our author gender breakdown is 28% female authors and 72% male authors. The gender breakdown of the first (or only) author is 31% female authors and 69% male authors. This is the first year we have attempted to quantify these author data, so we will begin making comparisons next year.
Copeia best papers
Every year, Copeia recognizes some of the excellent papers published in the journal. All papers are eligible unless they include a member of the Executive Committee as an author. The papers were considered by a panel, selected by the Editor, of Editorial Board members and ASIH members, to be the best papers published in 2018 (volume 106). Six papers are recognized each year: three in herpetology and three in ichthyology. There are three categories: Best Paper Overall, Best Paper Young Scholar, and Best Student Paper. The Best Paper Overall is chosen without regard to rank. The Best Paper Young Scholar is chosen when the lead author is a postdoc, untenured, or the equivalent at the time of submission. The Best Student Paper is chosen when the lead author is a student at the time of submission.
Ichthyology Best Paper: Terry C. Grande, W. Calvin Borden, Mark V. H. Wilson, and Lindsay Scarpitta. 2018. Phylogenetic Relationships among Fishes in the Order Zeiformes Based on Molecular and Morphological Data. Copeia106:20–48.
Ichthyology Best Paper Young Scholar: Javier Barrientos-Villalobos, Juan J. Schmitter-Soto, and Alejandro J. Espinosa de los Monteros. 2018. Several Subspecies or Phenotypic Plasticity? A Geometric Morphometric and Molecular Analysis of Variability of the Mayan Cichlid Mayaheros urophthalmus in the Yucatan. Copeia 106:268–278.
Ichthyology Best Student Paper: David T. Camak and Kyle R. Piller. 2018. Going with the Flow: Testing the Role of Habitat Isolation among Three Ecologically Divergent Darter Species. Copeia 106:375–387.
Herpetology Best Paper: Mark Merchant, Dusty Savage, Amos Cooper, Monique Slaughter, Joshuah S. Perkin, and Christopher M. Murray. 2018. Nest Attendance Patterns in the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). Copeia106:421–426.
Herpetology Best Paper Young Scholar: Will Selman and Peter V. Lindeman. 2018. Spatial, Seasonal, and Sexual Variation in the Diet of Graptemys flavimaculata, a Threatened Turtle of the Pascagoula River System, Mississippi, USA. Copeia 106:247–254.
Herpetology Best Student Paper: Rhett M. Rautsaw, Scott A. Martin, Bridget A. Vincent, Katelyn Lanctot, M. Rebecca Bolt, Richard A. Seigel, and Christopher L. Parkinson. 2018. Stopped Dead in Their Tracks: The Impact of Railways on Gopher Tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) Movement and Behavior. Copeia 106:135–143.
Additionally, it is my pleasure to note that Copeia nominated Rhett Rautsaw and collaborators’ award winning paper for the BioOne Ambassador Award this year. BioOne’s independent panel of judges selected this paper as one of this year’s Ambassador Award winners (http://www.bioonepublishing.org/BioOneAmbassadorAward/2019/2019Winners.html).
Copeia editing and acceptance statistics
Generally, performance statistics for editorial staff were similar but modestly faster for 2018 compared to 2017. For comparison, performance statistics for 2018 are followed by values for 2017 in brackets. The median time from submission to Associate Editor assignment was 2 [15] days, securing of first reviewer by the Associate Editor was 8 [15] days, securing of final reviewer by the Associate Editor was 16 [26] days, days in review was 28 [44] days, days from last review to Associate Editor recommendation was 4 [7] days, and days from Associate Editor recommendation to Editor decision was 1 [7] days. In total, all new submissions required a mean of 52 [66] days to initial decision (i.e., accept, reject, or further revision).
Associate Editor workload and mean duration (from receipt of submission to decision by Associate Editor for manuscripts that were received after January 1 and reached initial decision by December 31) under each Associate Editor were as follows for 2018: C. Beachy (4 new, 50 days), C. Bevier (11 new, 54 days), D. Buth (16 new, 43 days), M. Craig (20 new, 41 days), M. Davis (12 new, 64 days), T. Grande (6 new, 89 days), J. Kerby (6 new, 103 days), M. Lannoo (31 new, 31 days), J. Litzgus (9 new, 65 days), K. Martin (7 new, 56 days), R. Reis (12 new, 28 days), D. Siegel (25 new, 30 days), L. Smith (18 new, 30 days), J. Snodgrass (10 new, 69 days), and B. Stuart (12 new, 55 days). Most of these data are similar to those from 2017.
In an attempt to get a more accurate rejection rate for each Associate Editor, we are now including only new manuscripts (i.e., not revisions) where the initial submission was made between 2016 and 2018 and a final decision was rendered by 31 December 2018. Each research or review manuscript was tracked individually instead of relying on the AllenTrack system, which resulted in considerably more accurate results and higher rejection rates. These are not comparable to data from previous reports. The revised rejection rates for the associate editors between 2016 and 2018 are as follows: C. Beachy 7%, C. Bevier 31%, D. Buth 36%, M. Craig 36% (2017–2018), M. Davis 50% (2017–2018), T. Grande 33%, J. Kerby 45%, M. Lannoo 58%, J. Litzgus 47%, K. Martin 38%, R. Reis 8%, D. Siegel 44%, L. Smith 19%, J. Snodgrass 50%, and B. Stuart 48%.
For manuscripts that were submitted in 2018 and reached a decision date in 2018 (160 manuscripts), the rejection rate was 21.3% (down from 26.3% in 2017). The service of the Copeia reviewers is noted annually in the second issue of Copeia. There were 274 reviews (up from 215 in 2017) in total from 228 reviewers (up from 187 in 2017), and the average length of review duration was 26.2 days (down from 28.8 days in 2017).
Copeia production costs
As the costs associated with publishing and printing Copeia have been a point of discussion over the last several years, I have included the relevant costs paid to Allen Press below. For comparison, costs for 2018 are followed by values for 2017 in brackets. We paid Allen Press $94,986.20 [$94,375.32] for the production and distribution of Copeia as well as access to their AllenTrack manuscript submission and tracking system. [note: At the time of writing this report, ASIH paid $2,873.48 to Allen Press for sales tax associated with the printing and mailing of issues 2 and 3. We have not paid sales tax in previous years for any issues, so this is being discussed with Allen Press. If the sales tax is removed, the total cost would be $92,112.72.] The breakdown of these costs are as follows: printing Copeia–$33,782.25 [$33,003.84]; type setting and figure processing (for both online PDFs and printing)–$25,185.97 [$25,990.25]; Copeia online– $15,279.87 [$15,659.74]; mailing Copeia–$8,252.60 [$9,375.32]; proof corrections–$4,240.61 [$5,473.88]; AllenTrack–$4,828.41 [$4,261.67]; and other publication costs and sales tax for two issues: $3,416.49 [$610.62]. The costs for the membership management, production staff, editorial reimbursements, and the physical storage of ASIH and Copeia materials at Allen Press are not reflected in these figures. Revenue from paper or electronic subscriptions, paper copies of the journal associated with memberships, page charges, supplemental image reproduction (i.e., image reproduction beyond the subsidized costs), open access fees, and digital downloads are not reflected in these figures.
Copeia changes in 2019
This year is going to see a number of changes associated with our publishing partners. The year began on 1 January 2019 with BioOne transitioning from its long-time platform partner Atypon Systems to a new partnership with the nonprofit society SPIE. This transition was highlighted at the ASIH 2018 Board of Governors’ meeting when the CEO of BioOne, Dr. Susan Skomal, presented the benefits of the transition and highlighted their goal to ensure that this would be a seamless transition for all stakeholders: publishers, libraries, and users. It seems clear from minimal concerns raised by Copeia readers and discussions with librarians that the transition was largely seamless for the libraries and most users. If anything, the readers mostly benefitted from the new site’s more modern interface. Unfortunately, there were significant transition complications for the Copeia editorial office. Identifying problems with the transition and working with BioOne to correct the newly created problems required a substantial amount of time and energy from both the Copeia editorial office and BioOne. We want to take this opportunity to particularly thank Michael Di Natale at BioOne who spent a great deal of time and energy correcting problems with Copeia for us. The problems ranged from inconsistent to no registration of DOIs to incorrect rendering of the HTML/XML version of Copeia articles to the omission of critical information from the footer of Copeia articles to incorrect page numbers for all articles. The major problems have essentially been fixed, and, while we continue to identify smaller issues (e.g., incorrect reporting of most cited articles), BioOne continues to work with us to fix errors that were introduced by the transition. Fixing all of the problems was helped by the active participation of Dr. Al Savitzky who is both an ASIH member and a member of the Board of Directors at BioOne. The bottom line is that it is difficult for us and our partners to maintain continuity across the four different versions of Copeiathat are produced and available (the print version, the online PDF version, the HTML/XML version on the Allen Press site for members, and the HTML/XML version on BioOne), particularly when one or more of the versions transition.
Later in the year, we anticipate two major transitions with Copeia and Allen Press. First, they will be changing their publishing platform from Atypon Systems to Silverchair. Our hope is that our past experience with the transition of BioOne will help us navigate this transition. Unlike BioOne, Allen Press will allow us access to a beta version of the website, which we hope will greatly reduce the problems with the website going live. Second, Allen Press will be changing our manuscript tracking system from AllenTrack to PeerTrack. As with all of these transitions, there will be growing pains, but we are hopeful that the impact on our authors, members, and readers will be minimal and that the transitions will be beneficial. As a final note, Allen Press no longer offers authors the opportunity to purchase reprints of their articles. As such, we now receive print-quality PDFs of all Copeia articles. Authors can purchase this higher-resolution PDF, and it will be included at no cost to authors who purchase full open access with their publication.
