While this report covers 2019, it is important to note that the 2020 Board of Governors voted to change the name of the Society journal from Copeia to Ichthyology & Herpetology. This vote closed electronically on 2 July 2020 and stemmed from a motion from the Editor of Copeia that was supported unanimously by Executive Committee and by a 77 vote margin by the Board of Governors (88 in favor and 11 opposed to the name change). This change will begin with the first issue of 2021, and the journal will maintain volume number continuity with Copeia such that Ichthyology & Herpetology will begin in 2021 with volume 109.
At Copeia, I remain 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 continue to set high standards for our journal. I am sad to report that Co-Index Editor, Cindy Klepadlo, passed away unexpectedly on 3 June 2020. Her contributions have been immense, and she will be missed. I am happy to take this opportunity to welcome Dr. Julián Faivovich as a new General Herpetology Associate Editor. I continue to work with long-time production editor Katie Smith, who is in her 16th year with Copeia, and Matt Girard, who is in his second year as the illustration editor. With support from the Society, the Editorial Office continues to use Slack, Adobe Creative Suite, 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 remains a pleasure to work with Katie, Matt, all of the Associate Editors, and the staff at Allen Press (in particular, Alley Ulrich and April Parfitt). Finally, I thank the Society for supporting the publication of the research of its members and the authors who submit their manuscripts to Copeia. Copeia benefits tremendously from our members’ research, and we are making strides to increase the downloads, citations, and scientific and public awareness of our published articles.
Copeia Impact Factor, Download Statistics, and Altmetric Scores
At the end of 2019, Copeia’s impact factor was 1.018 (2018, 1.220; 2017, 0.980; 2016, 1.144; 2015, 1.034). This score places the journal slightly to the lower side of the median of the zoology journals that Copeia is properly compared to. Of the 170 zoology journals that receive an impact factor, Copeia ranked 98th. In last year’s report, Copeia was ranked 70 out of 167. For comparison, we performed better than the median impact factor of zoology journals which was 1.17. With regard to the impact factor, we performed slightly worse than most other herpetological and ichthyological journals, for example: Journal of Fish Biology–2.038; Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters–1.786; Herpetological Monographs–1.667; Herpetologica–1.284; Journal of Herpetology–0.971; Ichthyological Research–0.657.
Starting last year, I began to collate and provide discussion about the annual downloads/views 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”). BioOne changed its service provider, and it seems clear that the download statistics are not comparable between providers. I asked for clarification or a way to make them comparable, and they noted that the results were different and that they now include instances when people access the abstract alone (i.e., they include instances where someone accessed the paper, but did not necessarily have access to the whole paper or chose not to download the paper). I have modified these numbers from the previous two years to make them comparable by switching BioOne and JSTOR numbers to views or accesses rather than downloads. The other two websites (Allen Press and Squarespace) continue to use explicit download data. Please note that these new summative numbers will be referred to as “views” rather than downloads, and this change is why the 2017 and 2018 download numbers in this report do not match this 2019 Editor report.
Across all four websites, Copeia had 496,304 article views in 2019. This compares favorably to 203,023 views in 2018 and 192,507 views in 2017. In 2019, for the first time, most of our views were from BioOne (we had 388,554 views in 2019; 98,534 views in 2018; and 90,870 views in 2017). Our next largest source of views was JSTOR (95,655 views in 2019; 94,142 views in 2018; and 97,310 views in 2017). Finally, Squarespace (2,970 downloads in 2019 and 6,280 downloads in 2018 [our Squarespace site did not exist in 2017]) and Allen Press (9,125 downloads in 2019; 4,067 downloads in 2018; and 4,326 downloads in 2017) provided additional downloads. In addition to total downloads, we can examine in-year downloads. In 2019, we had 21,496 downloads of 2019 Copeia articles (14,773 on BioOne; 3,753 on Allen Press; and 2,970 on Squarespace). This compares favorably with 12,449 downloads of 2018 Copeia articles (6,280 on Squarespace; 4,844 on BioOne; and 1,325 on Allen Press), and 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 article in 2019 was 326, which compares favorably to 201 in 2018, and 73 in 2017. The increase in downloads is clearly associated with a few factors, primarily open-access downloads either through paid gold open access or the 50-day free download and secondary efforts by the journal and authors to share articles on social media.
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 links, it is not surprising that our mean and median Altmetric scores would improve in 2019 and 2018 relative to 2017 (all recorded on 10 June of the year following their publication year). In 2019, we had an increase in Altmetric scores. The are are reported as year, median, mean (low–high): 2019, 8, 40.0 (1–1,340); 2018, 7, 17.7 (1–320); 2017, 3, 8.40 (1–162). The improvement in 2019 is tied to continued efforts to increase visibility and the inclusion of more open-access publications, increased social media efforts, and the promotion of articles on Twitter and Facebook. The natural question is how do these Altmetric scores correlate with downloads. With one exception [A New Guitarfish of the Genus Pseudobatos (Batoidea: Rhinobatidae) with Key to the Guitarfishes of the Gulf of California] that had a considerably higher Altmetric score relative to downloads, the downloads of Copeia articles were highly correlated with Altmetric scores, suggesting that social media visibility is correlated with downloads, corroborating the results of numerous recent studies.
Copeia 2019 Snowbird Presentation on Improvements in Copeia
In 2019, the Editorial Office presented a poster on the improvements in Copeia at the Snowbird meeting. Some components were included in last year’s EDIT report, so I will only include other components of the poster here.
Copeia is trying to continue its trend of reducing the time manuscripts take from submission to publication. In an effort to identify which components had more variability, we calculated the number of days in each component for each research article published in 2018 (Figure 1). The idea is that the more variable components would be the best areas to focus on to continue to reduce publication time. A few things stood out. First, it was surprising that a second (or more) round(s) of review did not add considerably more time to manuscript review. Second, all four components of manuscript review and production take about 25% of manuscript turnaround time. We noted that there is variability in production time, but that this variability was tied mostly to the publication cycle of producing a quarterly journal, so that time cannot meaningfully be reduced or normalized while we continue to publish and print a journal four independent times a year. We can reduce editorial time by increasing the number of editors, so that the workload can be reduced and balanced. In order to reduce reviewer time, we have begun incentives such as publication figure credits for fast reviews (<20 days). We will continue to explore other ways of reducing the time of these components, and authors can always help themselves by reducing the amount of time that manuscripts are being revised.
Figure 1. Time (in weeks) that manuscript review and production took for all 2018 Copeia papers
In the poster, we also discussed the variation in article views/downloads across the papers we published in 2018 and compared three metrics across the three most downloaded Copeia papers and the three most viewed 2018 herpetological and ichthyological papers in four leading open-access journals (BMC Ecology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, PLOS One, and Zookeys). We used open-access journals because they provide view data as well as the other metrics. As has been reported elsewhere, the various impact and access measurements for journals are dominated each year by a subset of high performing papers. This phenomenon is true of Copeia. As of 10 June 2019, the average 2018 research article (n = 63) had 855 hits and been downloaded 237 times. Of the 63 research articles, 11 had more than 855 views and ten had more than 237 downloads (Figure 2). The top three most downloaded articles represented nearly 40% of all 2018 Copeia articles during the assessed time period.
Figure 2. Number of PDF downloads of 20 most downloaded 2018 Copeia papers through 10 June 2019
When we compare the three most viewed articles in Copeia to the three most viewed articles in four open-access journals, Copeia performs well (Figure 3). When we look at article views, the most viewed article was in Copeia and all Copeia articles were consistently more viewed than the BMC articles. This is noteworthy since articles in open-access journals should, on average, have higher views because of the lack of restrictions to the article. When we compare citations, the three high-performing Copeia papers are about average (Figure 3). At the same time, we are measuring citations for articles that have only been available for 6–14 months, so it does not even include the entirety of or the majority of the period that the standard impact factor uses. Finally, we have comparisons across the four journals for Altmetric scores. In this measure, Copeia is performing better than the open-access journals (Figure 3). Since 2018, Copeia has been sharing articles on Twitter and providing readers who follow those tweets or tweets by the authors with open-access links for the first 50 days after publication. These data show that across all of these metrics that Copeia performs well compared to peers and that our high-performing papers perform as well as or better than herpetological and ichthyological publications in prominent open-access journals. Because of the success of our social-media strategy, we will be expanding this strategy into Facebook and Instagram in the future to continue to promote Copeia articles.
Figure 3. Comparisons of 3 most viewed articles in Copeia compared to 3 most viewed herpetology and ichthyology articles in 4 open-access journals for views, citations, and social media impact
Copeia Submissions and Articles
There were 309 new and revised submissions in 2019 (17% increase over 2018). Of these, 170 were new submissions (5% increase over 2018). This is an average of 26 new and revised submissions per month (18% increase over 2018). There were 26 in 2019, 22 in 2018, 20 in 2017, 20 in 2016, and 24 in 2015. In terms of new submissions, October (23 new submissions) was the most active month, while September (8 new submissions) was the slowest month. Of these new submissions, 118 were from the United States and the rest were received as follows from an additional 17 countries: Argentina (3), Australia (5), Brazil (13), Canada (3), China (4), Colombia (5), Germany (1), Greece (1), India (1), Japan (7), Malaysia (1), Mexico (3), Nigeria (1), Poland (1), South Africa (1), Spain (1), and Taiwan (1).
In 2019, 827 pages of Copeia were published across four issues: March (207 pages), July (184 pages), October (205 pages), and December (231 pages). These represent an increase of 131 pages (i.e., up 18%) from 2018, which had 696 pages. The 2019 volume included 66 research articles (703 pages or 85% of the volume). The remaining pages (15% of volume) were distributed across three historical perspectives, three obituaries, 11 book reviews, editorial notes and news, instructions to authors, summary of the 2019 annual meeting, award announcements, subject and taxonomic indices of volume 106, and the volume contents of volume 107.
Of the 66 research and review papers published, 27 (41%) were ichthyological and 39 (59%) were herpetological. For comparative purposes, these statistics for the past several years (% ichthyological/% herpetological/both [if present]) are 54/44/2 for 2018, 53/47 for 2017, 34/65 for 2016, and 62/38 in 2015. 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 66 research and review papers published, we had 286 authors. We do not ask for demographic information from our authors, but our best estimate of our author gender breakdown is 26% female authors and 74% male authors. These results are similar to last year (the first year we attempted to quantify these data), which were 28% female authors and 72% male authors. The gender breakdown of the first (or only author) is 31% female authors and 69% male authors, which was identical to last year. In addition to authors, we went back and estimated the gender breakdown of reviewers (with the same caveats). For 2019, our reviewer gender breakdown was 25% female reviewers and 75% male reviewers. This was similar to our 2018 reviewer gender breakdown, which was 24% female reviewers and 76% male reviewers.
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 of the current or following year 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 2019 (volume 107). We thank Katyuscia Araujo-Vieira, Christopher Beachy, Matthew Girard, Hannah Owens, Kyle Piller, and Rhett Rautsaw for reviewing the 2019 papers. 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.
Herpetology—Best Paper—Cathy Brown, Lucas R. Wilkinson, Kathryn K. Wilkinson, Tate Tunstall, Ryan Foote, Brian D. Todd, and Vance T. Vredenburg.
Herpetology—Best Paper Young Scholar—Marco Suárez-Atilano, Alfredo D. Cuarón, and Ella Vázquez-Domínguez
Herpetology—Best Student Paper—Hunter J. Howell, Richard H. Legere Jr., David S. Holland, and Richard A. Seigel
Long-Term Turtle Declines: Protected Is a Verb, Not an Outcome. Copeia 107:493–501.
Ichthyology—Best Paper—Rikke Beckmann Dahl, Eva Egelyng Sigsgaard, Gorret Mwangi, Philip Francis Thomsen, René Dalsgaard Jørgensen, Felipe de Oliveira Torquato, Lars Olsen, and Peter Rask Møller
Ichthyology—Best Paper Young Scholar—Aaron D. Geheber
Ichthyology—Best Student Paper—Rebecca Branconi, James G. Garner, Peter M. Buston, and Marian Y. L. Wong
A New Non-Invasive Technique for Temporarily Tagging Coral Reef Fishes. Copeia 107:85–91.
Additionally, it is my pleasure to note that Copeia nominated Christopher Murray 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/2020/CM.html).
Copeia Editing and Acceptance Statistics
Generally, performance statistics for editorial staff for 2019 were similar to 2018. For comparison, performance statistics for 2019 are followed by values for 2018 in brackets. The median time from submission to Associate Editor assignment was 3 [2] days, securing of first reviewer by the Associate Editor was 7 [8] days, securing of final reviewer by the Associate Editor was 21 [16] days, days in review was 30 [28] days, days from last review to Associate Editor recommendation was 5 [4] days, and days from Associate Editor recommendation to Editor decision was 3 [1] days. In total, all new submissions required a mean of 51 [52] 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 reached initial decision by December 31, 2019 under each Associate Editor were as follows: C. Bevier (19 new, 34 days), D. Buth (19 new, 34 days), M. Craig (20 new, 44 days), M. Davis (18 new, 60 days), T. Grande (6 new, 94 days), E. Hilton (1 new, 50 days), J. Kerby (14 new, 89 days), M. Lannoo (28 new, 38 days), J. Litzgus (19 new, 43 days), K. Martin (1 new, 56 days), R. Reis (16 new, 25 days), D. Siegel (23 new, 33 days), L. Smith (30 new, 34 days), J. Snodgrass (12 new, 82 days), B. Stuart (22 new, 48 days), G. Watkins-Colwell (1 new, 33 days). Most of these data are similar to those from 2018.
For the last several years, we have attempted to get a more “accurate” rejection rate for each Associate Editor by taking a three-year average. Because of the transitioning from one manuscript system (AllenTrack) to a second manuscript system (PeerTrack), we will not be able to calculate a 3-year-average for the next three years. Rather than not give any rejection rates, we will present the rejection rates on an annual basis until 2023 because they cannot be tracked across systems. As these are not comparable to previous years, they are presented to give the Board of Governors a sense of the relative rejection rates of each of the Associate Editors, but there are reasons that we have shied away from single-year statistics in the past. These rejection rates will be skewed to appear higher than they actually are for most Associate Editors because they only include a single year and many papers go through revisions that stretch across multiple years, which are “unknown” in this annual report (why a three-year report is preferable when possible). The annual rejection rates for the individual Associate Editors are as follows: C. Bevier 33%, D. Buth 0%, M. Craig 25% , M. Davis 56%, T. Grande 0%, J. Kerby 50%, M. Lannoo 61%, J. Litzgus 50%, R. Reis 0%, D. Siegel 38%, L. Smith 31%, J. Snodgrass 100%, and B. Stuart 25%.
For manuscripts that were submitted in 2019 and reached a decision date in 2019 (143 manuscripts), the rejection rate was 21.0% (down from 22.3% in 2018). Additionally, we can look at the acceptance and rejection numbers for all papers in 2019. In 2019, 77 manuscripts were accepted and 39 manuscripts were rejected (33.6% rejection rate); this compares to 54 accepts and 45 rejects in 2018 (45.5% rejection rate) and 75 accepts and 47 rejects in 2017 (38.5% rejection rate). The service of the Copeia reviewers is noted annually in the second issue of Copeia. There were 296 reviews (up from 274 in 2018) in total from 232 reviewers (up from 228 in 2018), and the average length of review duration was 29.5 days (up from 26.2 days in 2018).
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 2019 are followed by 2018 in brackets. We paid Allen Press $107,616.02 [$94,986.20] for the production and distribution of Copeia as well as access to their AllenTrack manuscript submission and tracking system. The breakdown of these costs are as follows: printing Copeia–$39,513.60 [$33,782.25]; type setting and figure processing (for both online PDFs and printing)–$31,713.50 [$25,185.97]; Copeia online– $16,432.86 [$15,279.87]; mailing Copeia–$7,153.33 [$8,252.60]; proof corrections–$6,367.75 [$4,240.61]; AllenTrack–$5,069.81 [$4,828.41]; and other publication costs: $1,365.17 [$3,416.49]. 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 costs. Our revenues for Copeia from BioOne ($73,670), JSTOR ($10,794), and page charges/open access fees/etc. ($6,750) for articles in 2019 were: $91,214. Revenue from paper or electronic subscriptions and paper copies of the journal associated with memberships and subscriptions are not included in these revenues.
