Integrative Organismal Biology—A Journal We Want and Need

On behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology we are delighted to formally launch the new, open access journal—Integrative Organismal Biology (IOB). There is a long tradition of journals serving as organizing centers for ideas and fields. The Journal of Morphology was founded in 1887, at a time when there was a critical mass of biologists producing information on the structure of organisms. It has been central to that field for 131 years. In 1923, when experimental investigations of life needed a focal point, the Journal of Experimental Biology was founded to serve that purpose. We are currently in a new and delightful time to be a biologist. We have unprecedented access to tools that allow deep reductionist approaches to the mechanisms of life, and new technologies allow unprecedented access to both the natural history of organisms and their environment. We have a renewed appreciation of the organism as central to biological questions; and the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry are increasingly turning to organismal biology for complex and rewarding problems. It is time for a journal that has organismal biology at its center. A place where an examination of physiology spanning satellite remote sensing of the environment, camera traps, robotic data collection, molecular and genetic approaches to endocrinology, and sensory biology, can be published as an integrative manuscript with far reaching implications. IOB aims to be the journal that our scientific community will turn to for these discipline-spanning manuscripts. This new journal will be open access—authors will pay a processing charge to make their work available to everyone. It is clear that the traditional model of publishing articles for free, but charging subscriptions to libraries, produces systemic inequities in access to the results of scientific research. While nominally true that anyone can publish in a traditional journal, access to the results of research can be blocked for large numbers of scientists, as well as policy-makers, and the public, who do not have the advantage of affiliations with wealthy universities or research institutions. The outrageous profit margins of academic publishers are possible because of the disconnect between the people who produce the science and the libraries that pay the subscriptions. Open access has its own inequities, principally in the form of fees that many scientists cannot afford to pay. However, our goal at IOB will be to make costs to authors as affordable as possible, while gaining the benefit of providing access to all. As a component of this effort, publishing in IOB will be completely free for any author in a low-GDP country. For authors from more wealthy countries, contributions from home institutions and funding agencies also can help to offset the costs of open access publishing. Open access is not the perfect solution to the problem of disseminating scientific information, but we believe it is an important direction for the future of academic publishing. It is also a publishing mechanism that very directly supports SICB, an organization that has fostered organismal biologists for more than 100 years. Beyond issues of accessibility, scientific publishing has also been challenged by several fundamental concerns that have interfered with diversity and editors have a role to play in improving the situation (Resnik and Elmore 2015). We will strive for IOB to be a platform for change, with the goal of experimenting with steps that will make publishing more inclusive, supportive, and equitable. Among the simple changes we will embrace are double blind reviewing, and using author initials rather than full names when publishing papers (Maliniak et al. 2013; Darling 2015). This will increase diversity in authorship and may increase citation rate (Laband and Piette 1994). It is both remarkable and outrageous that when the author can be deduced to be female from the name, the citation rate of the paper goes down (Maliniak et al. 2013). There is no defensible reason not to use initials only, decreasing bias in citations. We will also be making a thoughtful effort to ensure that the reviewer pool for IOB is diverse. For most journals there is a significant skew in reviewer gender, and we are committed to making this journal reflect the diversity seen in science along as many axes as we can (Ross 2017). The most outlandish experiment we will conduct is in the area of peer review. It is an unfortunate truth that many reviews have at least some feedback that is stated in a way that makes it harder for the authors to view suggestions as a serious attempt to improve their manuscript. In many cases this is a matter of tone. In others it is simply an inappropriate comment. The editorial team at IOB is committed to reading reviewer comments with an eye toward only passing along constructive feedback, stated in a supportive, positive way. This does not mean we will change the reviewers’ words or reduce the rigor of comments. Instead, we will reserve the option to redact reviews, and summarize their content in the comments from the editors, to ameliorate unfortunate or combative phrasing. We are open to suggestions about new ways of doing business, so please offer your input to our ongoing and evolving experiment. We have assembled an outstanding, diverse, and supportive group of associate editors who handle manuscripts for the journal. The review process at IOB requires close interaction between the authors and the associate editor. Reviews do not pass straight to the author without passing through the associate editor’s filter for constructive and useful critique. This team of deeply engaged scientists takes the author experience and manuscript quality seriously, and they are willing to put in significant time to elevate the quality of the journal. A.P. Summers is a professor in Biology and the School of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs. His Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts, and he was a Miller Fellow at the University of California Berkeley. His research is in comparative anatomy and physiology. He is the chair-elect of DVM and a member of DCPB and DCB. R.W. Blob is a professor at Clemson University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and followed this up with post-doctoral work at the Field Museum of Natural History. His research focuses on the biomechanics, morphology, and evolution of vertebrate musculoskeletal function, using modern species and the fossil record. He is a past program officer of SICB and a member of DVM, DCB, DPCB, and DEE. M.A. Butler earned her Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis, and did post-doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. She studies biodiversity through the lens of morphology, physiology, and evolution at the University of Hawai’i. A fan of adaptive radiations, she is currently studying locomotor biomechanics and ecomorphology in the speciose microhylid frogs of Papua New Guinea and behavior in the adaptive diversification of Hawaiian Megalagrion damselflies. She also works on phylogenetic methods to study hypotheses of adaptive evolution. She is a member of DPCB, DCB, and DVM. C.G. Farmer earned a B.A. in physics at the University of Idaho, then worked as an engineer at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratories and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories before returning to Brown University to earn a Ph.D. She pursued post-doctoral work at the University of California, Irvine. Her recent research is centered around her discovery of aerodynamic valves in the lungs of non-avian reptiles. She is a member of DVM. C.A. Fassbinder-Orth received her Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a faculty member at Creighton University. Her general research foci are ecoimmunology and disease ecology, with specific interests in alphavirus dynamics in cimicid bugs and avian hosts and honey bee virus dynamics. She is a past chair of DEDE and a member of DCPB. L.P. Hernandez received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, did post-doctoral work at Wesleyan University, and is now at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. She works on the development, functional morphology, and evolution of trophic novelties within cypriniform fishes. In addition to the diversity of cyprinid fishes she uses zebrafish as a model to examine the effects of thyroid hormone on skeletal development. She is chair of DVM and a member of DEDB and DCB. I.T. Moore earned his Ph.D. at Oregon State University and did post-doctoral work at the University of Washington. As a professor at Virginia Tech he asks “how do animals respond to changes in their physical and social environments? What are the mechanisms mediating the behavioral and physiological responses to these changes?” His work crosses traditional disciplinary lines to gain a full understanding of animal function. He is a natural historian committed to the premise that one must study and appreciate animals in their natural environments to truly understand how they work. He is a member of DAB, DEE, and DCE. U.K. Muller earned a Ph.D. in Marine Biology from University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and did post-doctoral work at Cambridge University. She is currently a professor at California State University Fresno. Her research focuses on bio-fluid dynamics in the intermediate flow regime for animal and plant systems (larval fish, aquatic carnivorous plants). Her work uses experimental approaches, such as flow visualization, as well as mechanical and mathematical modeling to explore the fluid dynamics of swimming and suction feeding. She is a member-at-large of the SICB executive committee, and a member of DCB and DVM. R.A. Satterlie earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and did post-doctoral work at the University of Alberta (Canada). He is currently a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. A neurobiologist who works on neural control of locomotion in jellyfish and neural control of locomotory speed changes in the pteropod mollusk Clione limacina, he has published around 90 scientific papers. His deep interest in writing has led to five novels and a poetry collection. He is a military veteran (Army National Guard). He was the president of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and is a member of DNNSB. S.H. Williams received her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy from Duke University in 2004. She currently is a professor at Ohio University. Her research focuses on the functional morphology, biomechanics, and physiology of feeding in mammals. Her work uses experimental approaches (both in the laboratory and in the field), biomechanical modeling, and comparative anatomy to understand the factors driving the evolution of masticatory form and function in mammals. Her research specifically addresses questions relating to the ontogeny of feeding and oral structures; the relationship between skull loading and morphology; oromotor control, movement and coordination; and sensorimotor integration. She is the program officer for SICB and a member of DEE, DCB, and DVM. In collaboration with this talented team of associate of editors, we plan to make IOB the flagship journal for organismal biology sensu lato, and a place where SICB members are proud to see their best work.

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