Title: Transparency and open processes in <i>Journal of Animal Ecology</i>
Abstract: Transparency in science is an increasingly important topic and it is clear that this is also important to our readers. Taking inspiration from the 2017 Peer Review Week (https://peerreviewweek.wordpress.com/) theme of transparency, in this editorial, we look at the different ways that we have introduced openness and transparency in the publication process and more widely in journal practices. In 2016, we introduced author contribution statements in all published papers and offered a new data sources section for papers containing meta-analyses to enable the data sources to receive proper citation credit within the main article. Our efforts in 2017 range from giving a clear and transparent breakdown of the peer review process for the Journal (http://bit.ly/BESReviewProcess) to larger initiatives such as an open call for new Associate Editors, more on this below. Over the past few years we have been working hard to improve the gender balance and geographic diversity of our Editorial Board and at the start of 2017 our board had increased to 43% female editors with 16 countries represented (Wilson et al., 2017). This year, steps were taken to not only improve this diversity further but also to address the equality of the recruitment process. In June, the five British Ecological Society journals launched an open call for new Associate Editors. There was tremendous interest in this call and Journal of Animal Ecology alone received over 100 applications. We were delighted that so many excellent candidates expressed an interest in joining our editorial team and in the end we recruited 18 new Associate Editors. We are very pleased to welcome David Koons, Julien Cucherousset, Eric Vander Wal, David Richardson, Jean-Philippe Lessard, Marta Rueda, Allert Bijleveld, Annette Fayet, Chris Harrod, M. Noelia Barrios-Garcia, Xingfeng Si, Julian Resasco, Carola Gomez-Rodriguez, Sharon Zytynska, Emma Cunningham, Gabriel Machovsky-Capuska, Liu Xuan and Samantha Patrick. Earlier this year, we were also pleased to welcome Marie Auger-Methe, Isabella Cattadori, Damien Farine, Garrett Street and Ann Tate (find out about all our Editors here: http://bit.ly/JAEEditorialBoard). After 12 years’ service to the Journal Graeme Hays has stepped down as our In Focus Editor. Although the recruitment of Associate Editors through an open call was a new initiative, our Senior Editors have long been recruited in this way. Graeme Hays joined the board as a Senior Editor in November 2005 and became Executive Editor in July 2007 serving in that role until March 2011. Graeme remained on the board of Senior Editors until March 2014. Even after Graeme stepped down from the Senior Editor team, he remained involved with the Journal as In Focus Editor. In fact it was Graeme who championed the idea of having an In Focus section in the journal and he has been instrumental in making it, and the Journal, the great success it is today. We want to take this opportunity to thank Graeme for all his contributions over the past 12 years and to wish him all the very best for the future. We are pleased to welcome Jenny Gill as our new In Focus Editor. Jenny joined the Journal in January 2015 as an Associate Editor and becomes our third In Focus Editor following on from Corey Bradshaw and Graeme. Going forward Jenny plans to continue to use In Focus as a tool to highlight important studies in the Journal and their wider implications. We would like to thank the following Associate Editors who left at the end of 2017 for their great service to the Journal over many years: Kim Cuddington, Subhash Lele, Tom Ings, Shai Meiri, John Quinn, Volker Rudolf, Frank van Veen, Ben Woodcock, Simon Griffith, Alison Dunn and Alice Hughes. In spring 2017, we relaunched the Journal blog Animal Ecology In Focus. The aim was to give the blog a new voice and encourage more posts. We wanted to get new people with fresh ideas involved, so we advertised for a blog editor. We were delighted that so many great people applied to be part of the team. We are very pleased to welcome Sarah Marley (Curtin University, Australia) as Blog Editor and Ravindra Palavalli Nettimi (Macquarie University, Sydney) as Multimedia Editor. After collaborating with Assistant Editor Simon Hoggart to give the blog a new and fresh appearance (https://journalofanimalecology.wordpress.com/), Sarah has worked hard to commission great posts from our Associate Editors and authors on a variety of topics including the social networks of vultures and why Mark Twain was wrong about lizards. Ravindra has launched a new podcast series, Field Reports, where he talks to ecologists about their fieldwork experiences. You can hear how former Executive Editor Tim Coulson accidentally caught a boat to the wrong island; Associate Editor Ben Dantzer's encounters with squirrels, meerkats and bears (oh my!); and Associate Editor Julie Morand-Ferron's work on bird and insect cognition and the need to design slimmer bird-boxes, plus many more. Check them all out here: http://bit.ly/JAEFieldReports. Both the British Ecological Society and Journal of Animal Ecology have long been champions of research by early career ecologists. Indeed, there are many examples of early career researchers publishing their first papers in the pages of Journal of Animal Ecology. To continue, and we hope enhance, this tradition, in May 2016 we announced a new prize for early career researchers to submit Reviews or Synthesis papers though an open call for submissions. In Issue 3 of this volume we will be announcing the winner! This new prize will complement the Elton prize that has been awarded to the best research article published in the Journal since 1994. The 2016 prize was awarded to Roberto Salguero-Gómez for his paper “COMADRE: a global data base of animal demography” (Salguero-Gómez et al., 2016). We felt that the paper fills an important knowledge gap in animal ecology by providing open access to a global database of demographic analyses of animal populations at both intra- and interspecific levels. We were also impressed by Rob's ability to coordinate so successfully this huge work that involved a large network of people from many institutions (see Rob's blog post about this here: https://wp.me/p4r9fD-8o). Animal ecology often relies on, and benefits from, large successful collaborations (see our blog post on this issue: https://wp.me/p4r9fD-4W) and COMADRE is a prime example of how individuals can help drive such ventures. Special Features are collections of papers on a specific research theme. Our previous Special Features have generally been the brainchild of a small team of authors who approached the Journal unsolicited, but we felt that there was a need to open up the process so that a wider pool of ecologists could contribute to discussions around particular focal points. To this end, in June 2016 we announced an open call for submissions on Animal Host–Microbe Interactions (https://wp.me/p4r9fD-fj). We chose this theme because the recent advent of modern molecular approaches, such as next-generation sequencing, has made it much easier to characterize the rich resident and transitory microbial communities living within wild animal hosts, including the host gut microbiome, covert pathogens and endosymbionts. We were incredibly pleased with the number and quality of submissions we received, and we have accepted such a large number that they will form a stand-alone Special Issue in March. Journal of Animal Ecology has a long history of publishing papers on theoretical ecology. To celebrate this fact, Senior Editor Jean-Michel Gaillard looked back at the 25 most influential papers published in the Journal between 1933 and 2015. We hope that this Virtual Issue will stimulate further works proposing new theories in ecology. A theoretical paper in Journal of Animal Ecology should establish, or substantially extend, our theoretical understanding of an issue of general importance for the field of animal ecology. The best theory papers will have a close relationship with considerations of how empirical analysis can be tensioned against the new theoretical developments. Macroecology is another field where Journal of Animal Ecology has a long history of publishing important work. In a Virtual Issue Senior Editor Nate Sanders looked at how the Journal has helped drive the evolution of the field from the early work of Kevin Gaston and Tim Blackburn (e.g. Gaston & Blackburn, 1996) to current high-impact papers such as Calosi, Bilton, Spicer, Votier, and Atfield's (2010) on the determinants of geographical range in European diving beetles. We continue to collaborate with our partner British Ecological Society journals (Functional Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution) with Virtual Issues on Open Data, Ecology in China, Invasive Species and The Ecology of Exercise. There was even a cross-Society collaborative Virtual Issue on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (http://bit.ly/BES_ESA_VI) involving the five Ecological Society of America journals (Ecology, Ecosphere, Ecological Applications, Ecological Monographs, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment), the five journals of the British Ecological Society, and Ecology and Evolution. We have a Special Feature on Allee Effects in Ecology and Evolution, convened by Andrew Kramer, Luděk Berec and John Drake. Allee effects are a key, but understudied, process that shapes both population dynamics and evolution. Through improving our understanding of Allee effects and their role in the dynamics of natural populations, ongoing invasions, and eco-evolutionary dynamics the Special Feature aims to benefit population ecology, environmental management (e.g. managing invasive species) and species conservation. The In Focus for this issue is by Associate Editor Anna Kuparinen (Kuparinen, 2018) and looks at two papers from the Special Feature (Berec, Kremer, Bernhauverova, & Drake, 2018; Shaw, Kokko, & Neubert, 2018) that demonstrate how population growth can reduce at low abundances, increasing the risk of extinction and how this might occur in response to difficulties that individuals experience in finding mates. Along with a great collection of original research articles, we also have number of feature articles in this issue; two Synthesis papers which are comprehensive overviews of well-established field or laboratory study systems targeted at a broad ecological audience. The first by Krebs, Boonstra, and Boutin (2018) looks at the classic snowshoe hare cycle in the boreal forest of North America and the second by McDonald, Robertson, and Silk (2018) looks at the long-term study of a naturally TB-infected European badger population at Woodchester Park. This issue also contains three Review papers; Reviews for Journal of Animal Ecology should be synthetic and provide novel insights on topical subjects of general interest to the readership. The first Review is by Lauren White (White, Forester, & Craft, 2018) and looks at dynamic, spatial models of parasite transmission in wildlife, the second is by Webber and Vander Wal (2018) and proposes an evolutionary framework outlining the integration of individual social and spatial ecology, and the third is by Angulo et al. (2018) and is from the Special Feature on Allee Effects in Ecology and Evolution. Finally we have a ‘How to…’ paper by Damien Farine (2018) “When to choose dynamic versus static social network analysis?”. ‘How to…’ papers in the Journal are instructional papers that aim to serve as a practical guide for animal ecologists in using a specific experimental or theoretical model or system. We are always looking to publish more Synthesis, ‘How to…’ and Review papers; information on these paper types can be found in our author guidelines.