2020 was a challenging year for everyone, and, for Copeia, this unfortunately coincided with a change in every major digital aspect of the operation, production, and dissemination of the research we publish and the rebranding of the journal as Ichthyology & Herpetology. Thankfully, the one aspect of the journal that did not change was the people involved with the scientific and day-to-day operations of the journal. Our associate editors, editorial office, and publication partners rose to the occasion and performed remarkably through the changes brought on by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the updates to the aging digital infrastructure we were relying on. I want to specifically thank the associate editors who are all excellent scientists and who all spent precious time to share their expertise, improve manuscripts, and shepherd papers through the new manuscript tracking system during a pandemic. I also want to specifically thank the two other members of the editorial office, Katie Smith and Matt Girard. They are incredibly talented and dedicated, and I am proud to say that we were able to continue to work seamlessly together through a combination of Dropbox, Slack, in-person conversations, texts, and video calls to copyedit, standardize, correct, and polish the fantastic scientific papers we accept for publication. In 2020, the Society called on Matt and Katie to help run the virtual meetings, to correct and troubleshoot a new manuscript tracking system (twice because of the journal name change), to copyedit and critique the design of a brand new journal website, to produce social media content for the published articles, to mail thousands of stickers/magnets to interested parties, to liaise with university press offices, and to help with the countless hurdles required to change the name of the journal. I am indebted to them for this effort, which was far outside of what they are “supposed” to do for their positions, was done during a pandemic, and was accomplished while also publishing 24% more pages than the year before. There are many other people to thank for everything over the last year (see “Introduction to Ichthyology & Herpetology” in the first issue of 2021 for the individuals that helped with the name change specifically), but I do want to highlight Chris Beachy, Prosanta Chakrabarty, Matt Davis, Alexandra Frankel, Matt Girard, Rene Martin, Caleb McMahan, Katie Smith, Kevin Tang, and Alley Ulrich from whom I sought advice constantly. Each one of those individuals was critical to the many changes we made in 2020. We would never have successfully changed so many important things in one year without all of their efforts. I thank each and every one of them for the work they put in on behalf of ASIH.
The Year of Change—2020
Obviously, the largest change in 2020 was the Board of Governors voting to change the journal’s name from Copeia to Ichthyology & Herpetology after 108 years of publishing under its original name, but there were other significant changes as well. First, we began visually branding the first page of each article with the ASIH logo. Further, 2020 saw the manuscript tracking system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/asih) and the member and subscriber website (www.asihcopeiaonline.org) change for the first time in twenty years (i.e., since the original online systems for each were created). I want to take this opportunity to personally thank former Editor Michael Douglas for having the foresight and drive to implement these systems. I can now say with some certainty that 1999 and 2000 must have been incredibly challenging for him. Thank you, Mike! All of these changes will help improve the visibility and “look and feel” of the research we publish and the operation, compliance, and security of our journal websites.
(1) While the journal name change is fundamental to the Society, most of the details are discussed in the “Introduction to Ichthyology & Herpetology” that was published in the first issue of 2021. In this slightly less visible venue, the one thing I should note is how often the path was unclear during the process of rebranding the journal. There is no “how-to manual” for changing the name of a journal. There is no webpage, YouTube video, or expert that could help walk one through it. There were some obvious components, there were breadcrumbs in many places, and our publication partners had critical nuggets of information at many stages, but the path to finalizing the name change was circuitous. We would have never accomplished this change without the ten people I thanked at the end of the first paragraph of this report whom I queried daily for advice. It is my belief and sincere hope that we have successfully made all of the needed changes, but if there are any outstanding issues, I would like to apologize and personally take responsibility for them now. I encourage people to email me with suggestions or if they identify missteps or omissions associated with the name change.
(2) Thirty years ago, scientists would visit the library new books and journals room, recognize the journals that they wanted to flip though for potentially interesting research, and then they would photocopy the articles or request reprints based on what they found. They were drawn to the branding of the journals that they were interested in. Today, almost no one finds research articles by browsing a printed issue of a journal. Instead, researchers and the public discover scientific articles using search engines, PDF-sharing websites, blogs, and social media posts. Scientists see journals as collections of PDFs, and they pay little to no attention to what issue an article was printed in, or, in many cases, what journal it was published in. PDFs live either in curated (or not) set of folders on our computer or stored in reference management software, not in matching issues on the shelves of a library. Recognizing that we had lost the important branding provided by attractive and consistent covers in this isolated PDF world, the editorial office decided that we had to increase the ASIH and journal branding on the first page of every article published in our journals. To succeed, we need people to know that the paper they are reading is from Copeia/Ichthyology & Herpetology.
To give you a sense of the branding changes that we made, here is an example of our 2008–2019 branding where there was only a small Copeia in the header and no ASIH logo; the source of this article is practically hidden on the PDF:
In 2020, we began putting the ASIH logo and a large Copeia “image” in the header on the first page to increase the awareness of our journal when a given paper was published by us. Obviously, the journal name change between 2020 and 2021 made the 2020 design extremely short lived, but we took the design lessons we learned and used those to guide the rebranding of the Ichthyology & Herpetology PDFs. The much longer journal name, in particular, forced substantial design revisions. After many iterations, we designed a journal logo that was largely based on the ASIH branding and simply surrounded the seahorse, shield, and anole with the words Ichthyology & Herpetology. You can see the 2020 and 2021 and beyond branded headers below:
It is our hope that an increase in branding on the front page of our PDFs will help people remember that the articles they are reading were published in Ichthyology & Herpetology. Ideally, this should lead to increased awareness of the journal for potential authors, readers, and journalists.
(3) In the 2019 Editor Report, I noted that BioOne had transitioned to working with SPIE for its publication platform that we use for distributing our research to various educational, governmental, and private organizations. In the fall of 2020, Allen Press transitioned to the Meridian publication platform, a system that they operate with Silverchair, that we use for distributing our research to our members and subscribers. As with the BioOne change, this new system is more attractive, provides greater functionality, and is more secure and compliant with the ever-increasing regulations on website data. It is a significant improvement that we are grateful for. Katie Smith, a few beta testers (Matt Davis, Matt Girard, and Kevin Tang), and I provided feedback on the overall appearance, functionality, and features of the new website. However, as noted in the 2019 Editor Report for the BioOne transition, these platform changes introduce an incredible number of errors that demand a lot of time to identify and correct. Fortunately, a lot of the mistakes that we identified for the BioOne transition were repeated in this transition, so that cut down on the time it took to identify issues, but there were still hundreds of issue types that caused thousands of errors (as was true with the BioOne transition). Allen Press has been working through these corrections that ranged from larger items such as associate editors being listed as authors of papers and papers missing images to smaller issues such as inconsistent formatting of the Table of Contents or scientific names in the literature cited not being italicized. It is difficult to search 80 issues and 19,669 printed pages of content for errors where randomly one author initial is lost in a few articles without any discernible pattern, so surely many errors remain. If you see an error or needed correction for either the BioOne or Meridian website, please let us know, and please provide enough detail to highlight the problem and write the email in a professional format that we can simply forward on to the appropriate publication partner. We would be happy to make any and all corrections that people find, but we would also like to minimize our effort in relaying that information to the companies that can fix it. This website had the additional complication that three months after the website went live, we changed the name of the journal and had to rebrand it again, albeit with the same frameworks and features. However, it retains the old URL for the journal (https://meridian.allenpress.com/copeia). The decision was made by the ASIH Executive Committee after consultation with and support from the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee that the charge (in excess of $20,000) from Silverchair to change the URL to https://meridian.allenpress.com/asih was not money well spent at this time. Despite the retention of the old URL, the work it took from the editorial office and our publication partners, and the ongoing hunt for more errors on the website, we are excited to have these updated platforms to securely distribute the research of our authors in the best possible way.
(4) In the 2019 Editor Report, I noted that Allen Press would be transitioning the manuscript tracking system from AllenTrack to PeerTrack, which is a variant of the familiar Editorial Manager. As was discussed over the last several years for changes with the publication websites, changing the manuscript tracking system is also a lot of work and is a source of problems and complications. Countless decisions, no matter how small, had to be made. After we got a functioning prototype, Katie Smith and I generated the hundreds of default messages that the system sends from manuscript acceptance to reviewer requests. At that time, Matt Davis, Matt Girard, Rene Martin, Roberto Reis, Dustin Siegel, Katie Smith, Kevin Tang, and I beta tested the website in a variety of roles to try and identify problems or settings that we wanted changed. Scores of settings were changed after we beta tested the website, but before the site went live. During the course of 2020, it became clear that other things needed to change. These changes and the associated discussion are covered in the Publications Policy Committee Report that is elsewhere in this Board of Governors book. As with the publication websites, 2020 also required us to rebrand the manuscript tracking website at the end of 2020 in preparation for the journal name change. That required modifying every message in the system and additional changes to the look of the website itself. While those changes were mostly cosmetic and editorial changes, it was an added complication that introduced new errors or highlighted other issues. This was yet one more thing in an already challenging year, but the editorial team is excited to be past the largest hurdles and to have an updated platform to securely review manuscripts with new features such as double-anonymous review and co-reviewing.
In last year’s Editor Report, I noted that a few statistics were not comparable between the two manuscript tracking systems. Well, 2020 is the year where some of our familiar calculations cannot be made or will be calculated differently (e.g., the previous system reported medians and the current system reports means). The new system also has a diversity of calculations that the previous system could not calculate, and the old system had a diversity of calculations that the new system cannot calculate. Instead of trying to manually cobble together data that were presented earlier in Editor Reports for consistency’s sake, I am going to focus on presenting data that we can use and compare going forward for the best possible Editor Report using the new PeerTrack manuscript tracking system.
Copeia Impact Factor, View Statistics, and Altmetric Scores
At the end of 2020, the impact factor of Copeia was 1.160 (2018, 1.018; 2017, 1.220; 2016, 0.980). This score places the journal essentially at the median of zoology journals. Of the 169 zoology journals that receive an impact factor, Copeia ranked 86th. In last year’s report, Copeia was ranked 98 out of 170. For comparison, we performed essentially at the median impact factor of zoology journals which was 1.188. With regard to the impact factor, we performed slightly worse than most other herpetological and ichthyological journals, for example: Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters–1.786; Herpetological Monographs–1.667; Journal of Fish Biology–1.497; Herpetologica–1.284; Journal of Herpetology–0.971; Ichthyological Research–0.657. It is important to note that our impact factor for the next few years will be awkward because Clarivate will treat Copeia and Ichthyology & Herpetology independently. They do allow us to combine them into one, which I will do, but they will be reported on their websites as two independent and individually lower values.
Starting in 2018, we began to report the annual views of our publications across all four websites that provide access to our research: the membership website (“Allen Press”), the BioOne website (“BioOne”), the 50-day open-access website (“Squarespace”), and the JSTOR website (“JSTOR”). Unfortunately, Allen Press lost the data from the original Allen Press website, so all summary values and Allen Press values are probably 5,000 to 10,000 views lower than they should be. The affected values will be followed by an asterisk. Across all four websites, Copeia had 487,175* article views in 2020. This is slightly less than the 496,304 views in 2019 and much more than the 203,023 views in 2018 and the 192,507 views in 2017. As was discussed in last year’s report, many of a journal’s impact factor, downloads/views, and Altmetric scores are disproportionately affected by a few high-performing articles. Rather than lower impact, I believe that the lack of a growth in views was a result of publication delays. Because of COVID-19 work restrictions, there were many delays at Allen Press through the year. These delays manifested in such a way that 43% of all research articles were published in the last quarter of the year, 25% of all research articles were published in the last month of the year, and 12% of all research articles were published in the last eight days the year. Those end of the year publication dates didn’t give much time to accrue article views in calendar year 2020. I anticipate that views will go up in 2021. Most of our article views were from BioOne (2020: 268,528 views; 2019: 388,554 views; 2018: 98,534 views; 2017: 90,870 views). Our next largest source of views was JSTOR (2020: 155,776 views; 2019: 95,655 views; 2018: 94,142 views; 2017: 97,310 views), followed by Allen Press (2020: 58,082*; 2019: 9,125 views; 2018: 4,067 views; 2017: 4,326 views), and finally our Squarespace website where people download PDFs for our 50-day open-access links (2020: 4,789 downloads; 2019: 2,970 downloads; 2018: 6,280 downloads; there was no Squarespace website in 2017). In addition to total views, we can examine within-year views. In 2020, we had 44,930* views of 2020 Copeia articles (31,018 on BioOne, 9,120* on Allen Press, and 4,789 on Squarespace). This compares favorably with 21,496 views of 2019 Copeia articles in 2019, 12,449 views of 2018 Copeia articles in 2018, and 5,104 views of 2017 Copeia papers in 2017. The mean number of views per article of 2020 research articles was 599*, which is higher than previous years (2019: 326; 2018: 201; 2017: 73). The continued increase in views is clearly associated with a few factors, primarily the increase in articles, open-access articles, and the 50-day open-access links.
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 an algorithm that attempts to summarize and quantify the online activity or reach surrounding scholarly content. With our increased efforts to share our publications through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the 50-day open-access links, it is not surprising that our mean and median Altmetric scores would improve in 2018–2020 relative to 2017 (all recorded on 10 June of the year following their publication year). In 2020, we had an increase in median and decrease in mean for Altmetric scores. These are reported as year, median, mean (low–high): 2020, 12, 25.1 (1–362); 2019, 8, 40.0 (1–1,340); 2018, 7, 17.7 (1–320); 2017, 3, 8.40 (1–162). The general improvement in median Altmetric value in 2020 is tied to continued efforts to increase the visibility and reach of every paper we publish through the promotion of articles on social media.
Copeia Submissions, Articles, and Reviewers
There were 343 new and revised submissions in 2020 (11% increase over 2019). Of these, 174 were new submissions (almost identical to 2019 [173]). This is an average of 29 new and revised submissions per month. There were 26 in 2019, 22 in 2018, 20 in 2017, and 20 in 2016. In terms of new submissions, May (20 new submissions) was the most active month, while November (9 new submissions) was the slowest month. Of these new submissions, 117 were led by an author from the United States and the rest were led by authors from the following 21 countries: Argentina (2), Australia (5), Bahamas (1), Brazil (12), Canada (4), Chile (1), China (4), Colombia (3), Czech Republic (1), Egypt (1), Germany (1), India (4), Iran (1), Japan (5), Mexico (5), Norway (1), Pakistan (1), Republic of Korea (1), Russian Federation (1), South Africa (1), and Spain (2).
In 2020, 1,026 pages of Copeia were published across four issues: March (229 pages), July (212 pages), November (269 pages), and December (316 pages). These represent an increase of 199 pages (i.e., up 24%) from 2019, which had 827 pages. Volume 108 included 75 research articles (921 pages or 90% of the volume). The remaining pages (10% of volume) were distributed across one historical perspective, five obituaries, eight book reviews, editorial notes and news, instructions to authors, award announcements, subject and taxonomic indices of volume 107, and the volume contents of volume 108. Of the 75 research and review papers published, 36 (48%) were ichthyological, 38 (51%) were herpetological, and one was relevant to both fields equally (1%). For comparative purposes, these statistics for the past several years (% ichthyological/% herpetological/both [if present]) are 41%/59% for 2019, 54%/44%/2% for 2018, 53%/47% for 2017, and 34%/65% for 2016. The proportion of ichthyological vs. herpetological submissions represents which manuscripts are accepted for publication; it is not a goal of the editorial office to balance the taxonomic distribution. Across the 75 research and review papers published, we had 336 authors. We do not ask for demographic information from our authors, but our best estimate of our author gender breakdown is 27% female authors and 73% male authors, which is identical to 2019 and similar to 2018 where our authors were approximately 28% female and 72% male.
In 2020, we invited 635 reviews; 168 of those review requests were declined (26.5%), 93 review requests were ignored (14.6%), and 16 reviewers that accepted an invitation to review were terminated because of extensive delays (2.5%). Therefore, we had 338 reviews from 258 reviewers which were up from the previous years (296 reviews from 232 reviewers in 2019 and 274 reviews and 228 reviewers in 2018). Therefore, 56.4% of review requests resulted in a peer review that helped the journal editors make a decision on a paper. Across all reviews, 240 were from the United States and the rest were received as follows from an additional 24 countries: Argentina (3), Australia (12), Brazil (22), Canada (11), China (1), Colombia (2), Czech Republic (1), Ecuador (3), Germany (4), Hong Kong (1), India (5), Italy (4), Japan (3), Mexico (5), Netherlands (1), Norway (1), Russian Federation (1), Singapore (1), South Africa (2), Spain (4), Switzerland (2), Thailand (1), United Kingdom (7), and Uruguay (1). We do not ask for demographic information from our reviewers, but our best estimate of our reviewer gender breakdown is 25% female reviewers and 75% male reviewers. This was identical to our 2019 reviewer gender breakdown and similar to our 2018 reviewer gender breakdown, which was 24% female and 76% male. Finally, the average number of days a reviewer took to respond to an invitation to review was 3.4 days. The average number of days it took a reviewer to complete a review was 25.6 days (compared to 29.5 days in 2019 and 26.2 days in 2018).
Copeia Awards
It is my pleasure to note that Copeia nominated David Shiffman and collaborators’ paper, Trends in chondrichthyan research: an analysis of three decades of conference abstracts; 108(1): 122–131, for the BioOne Ambassador Award this year. BioOne’s independent panel of judges selected this paper and its associated plain-language summary of the lead author’s response to “how does your research change the world?” as one of this year’s Ambassador Award winners (http://www.bioonepublishing.org/BioOneAmbassadorAward/2021/David-Shiffman.html).
Every year, Copeia recognizes some of the excellent papers published in the journal. Historically, these have been announced in the second issue of the year and listed in this report. Starting in 2021, we will be announcing these awards at the Business and Awards Meeting (BAAM) at our annual meeting. From this year forward, the best papers of the year will not be reported in the Editor Report to avoid spoiling the announcement at the BAAM. Interested parties should attend the BAAM, look at the Summary of the Meetings that can be found in either the fourth or first issue of the year in Ichthyology & Herpetology, or read the award announcements that appear before research articles in the first issue of the year in Ichthyology & Herpetology.
Copeia Editing and Acceptance Statistics
Generally, performance statistics for the editorial staff for 2020 were similar to previous years. For comparison, performance statistics for 2020 (means) are followed by values for 2019 (medians) in brackets. As noted above, the different systems calculated averages differently. The average time from submission to associate editor assignment was 8 [3] days. The average time from submission to reviewer invitations was 16 [16] days. The average time from submission to initial editor decision was 56 [51] days.
The following table provides information on the handling editors. These data include the number of manuscripts handled, the within-year rejection rate for new submissions and revisions, the average time to decision on new submissions (from associate editor assignment to associate editor decision), and the overall average time to decision on new submissions and revisions (from associate editor assignment to associate editor decision). Please note that all editorial desk rejections by Leo Smith are included in the table this year, but they have been excluded in years past. If the data are compared to previous years, the associate editor time to decision values are, on average, faster despite overall times being longer. This can be explained by two factors. First, the average manuscript was sent back to authors for more revisions in 2020 relative to 2019 (34 additional revisions handled in 2020 relative to only a single additional new submission). On average, revisions took 57% less time than new submissions for associate editors to make a decision, so increases in revisions decrease the overall average time to decision on a per associate editor level. Second, I took longer to pass manuscripts to associate editors and to make final decisions relative to years past. This is simply an unfortunate consequence of my time being spent on all the other Copeia/Ichthyology & Herpetology changes that occurred in 2020.
For manuscripts that were submitted in 2020 and reached a decision date in 2020 (115 manuscripts), the rejection rate was 21.7%, which is similar to 21.0% in 2019 and 22.3% in 2018. Additionally, we can look at the acceptance and rejection numbers for all papers in 2020. In 2020, 88 manuscripts were accepted, and 32 manuscripts were rejected (26.67% rejection rate). This rejection rate was lower than the 33.6% rejection rate in 2019, the 45.5% rejection rate in 2018, and the 38.5% rejection rate 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 and will continue to include the relevant costs paid to Allen Press below so that Governors can help determine if and when we should consider publishing Ichthyology & Herpetology as an electronic-only publication. All data will be presented for 2020 followed by 2019 data in brackets. When examining the increases in 2020, there are two important factors to keep in mind. First, we published 199 additional pages (or an increase of 24%). Manuscripts in Copeia have been getting longer, and we are receiving a higher percentage of quality manuscripts (hence the decrease in rejection rate). It was clear that this was going to result in an increase in printed pages, so I raised the issue at the Executive Committee Meeting to determine concerns about increased costs. The Executive Committee recommended that we publish all the papers without delay and noted that they were not immediately concerned about increased costs because of the value of a healthy journal for the Society. The issue was also discussed at the Publications Policy Committee Meeting.
The explicit revenue for Copeia in 2020 was $142,393 [$146,244]. The breakdown for this revenue is: $78,148.14 [$84,464] for electronic publication (BioOne $67,142; JSTOR $11,006.14), $24,130 [$26,950] for printed issues of Copeia (members $18,100; subscribers $6,030), $27,040 [$30,080] for online subscriptions to Copeia, and $13,075 [$6,750] for open-access fees/high-resolution proofs/figure and page charges/etc. This explicit revenue value assumes that $0 from memberships (beyond the printed journal if paid for) is revenue attributable to the journal.
The total cost of Copeia in 2020 was $155,894.59 [$149,085.77]. The majority of this cost is paid to Allen Press. We paid Allen Press $130,030.80 [$109,682.69] for the production and distribution of Copeia, for access to their manuscript submission and tracking systems, and for some additional charges associated with the rebranding and design of the journal as Ichthyology & Herpetology. The breakdown of these costs are as follows: printing Copeia—$52,215.13 [$39,513.50]; typesetting and figure processing (for both online PDFs and printing)—$36,661.01 [$31,713.50]; Copeia online—$17,572.32 [$16,432.86]; mailing Copeia—$7,830.03 [$7,153.33]; proof corrections—$7,497.32 [$6,367.75]; manuscript tracking system—$5,159.46 [$5,069.81]; Copeia management, renewals, and warehousing—$2,544.67 [$2,066.67]; and other publication and design costs—$550.86 [$1,365.17].
One item that we should begin paying particular financial attention to is that BioOne can now provide journal access to Society members. This was raised by me in the 2020 Executive Committee Meeting and was tabled. This new member benefit (that is not currently enabled) means that we should annually compare institutional online and print revenues relative to the cost of Copeia online, particularly if and when we stop printing the journal (see below). In 2020, institutional online subscription revenue was $27,040, and print subscription revenue was $6,030. The institutional online subscription revenue was $9,467.68 more than the $17,572.32 that we spent on Copeia online. As these numbers approach each other, which is the trajectory they are on, we will need to address this issue. The Editor should report this comparison annually.
In 2020, we paid $60,459.63 [$47,574] to print and mail Copeia (printing of journal, mailing of journal, and production of halftone images when color-online only), and we had explicit print issue revenue of $24,130 [$26,950]. Members chose to join the Society and pay their commensurate membership fees plus $50 for the print journal if desired. Across all memberships, 362 [395] pay for the print journal. Similarly, 67 institutional subscribers each pay $90 (in addition to the $160 for online access) for the print journal. We do not know what percentage of our printed-journal members and subscribers would cancel their membership/subscription if we stop printing the journal, but it is safe to assume that some of them would cancel. In 2020, that exact number became irrelevant. In 2020, we had 362 annual members and 67 institutional subscribers who paid for online access and a printed copy of the journal. In total, these 362 members paid $37,245, and these 67 institutional subscribers paid $16,750. Combined, we collected $53,995 [$62,120] in revenue from patrons with print memberships/subscriptions and paid $60,459.63 [$47,574] to print and mail those patrons their printed journals. Therefore, we spent $36,329.63 more to print and mail the journal than we explicitly recovered in excess charges. Even if all the members and subscribers that paid in 2020 for the print journal had stopped renewing their membership or subscription because we had stopped printing the journal, we would still have saved $6,464.63 by not printing the journal. With these numbers changing such that we are unquestionably losing money printing the journal, it is critical for the Society to consider whether we need to A) increase the cost of receiving the print journal or B) begin the transition to an exclusively electronic journal as our printing contract ends. There is an intangible value to printing the journal, having a printed record, and retaining an analog backup of all the research we publish in the form of 100s of issues of journals mailed and distributed all over the world. As a Society, now is the time that we need to decide how much those intangibles are worth.
