Changing of the editors and JPR's role as a journal for the plankton research community

I am writing as the new Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the Journal of Plankton Research (JPR) as of 1 January 2025. In this role, I am very much looking forward to some new challenges—hopefully more overall positive than difficult ones. I started as an Associate Editor (AE) with the journal in 2010 during Roger Harris’ tenure and have learned much about the journal through him as well as our retiring EiC John Dolan. I would like to thank John Dolan for his many years of leadership at the Journal of Plankton Research. He is stepping down after 7 years as EiC, following on a decade as an AE. John brought a wealth of publishing experience to JPR after years working to turn the ASLO Bulletin into a full-fledged journal. He has shepherded JPR through challenging and rapidly changing times in scientific publishing, and in the world in general. John has also assured a place in the collective memory for the origins and history of plankton research through many fascinating articles as EiC. He has also been a dedicated updater of our social media posts and populated these with amazing plankton pictures. I thus warmly thank him for his many years of service to the journal. I am also hoping that he will continue to supply fabulous plankton pictures to our community. To introduce myself, I am a freshwater plankton researcher based at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) in Canada. I work primarily on lakes in the region around Montréal, but I have also participated in cross-Canadian lake surveys (the LakePulse Project that took three summers to complete given the size of the country). I have worked extensively on both phytoplankton and zooplankton, with a large focus on functional traits, spatial and community ecology more generally. I bring to the journal a wide range of experience, including an extensive range of approaches: lake surveys, whole-lake manipulation, paleolimnology, mesocosm experiments, lab studies and modelling. I have collaborated with oceanographers on some of my trait-based work and look forward to getting to know the marine plankton literature better as EiC of JPR. We have a great group of oceanographers and limnologists as journal Editors helping to ensure that JPR is publishing the best plankton research, be it more or less salty. In fact, I would love to hear from the plankton research community about your ideas for how to better integrate our collective knowledge, independent of habitat salinity. As freshwaters get saltier and saltwaters get fresher in many parts of our increasingly challenged planet, we will need a greater integration of our knowledge base. To me, one of the strengths of JPR has always been that some cross-fertilization happens somewhat naturally whenever one reads any issue of the journal. Times are challenging in scientific publishing with many new journals populating the landscape and making it difficult for younger researchers to know which represent genuine avenues to reach their scientific community, and which are either too broad or predatory. I see the Journal of Plankton Research as an ideal way to reach other plankton researchers, whether a topic is about small-scale anatomy or behaviour, or about community macroecology. JPR is here for all of us who love to study plankton, and I hope this community of plankton researchers will continue to support the journal through manuscript submissions and reviewing, when called upon. I would like to point out the Oxford University Press (OUP), as a publisher is a “mission-driven, not-for-profit university press”. Continuing from the OUP web page: “our publishing strategy is guided not by shareholder expectations but by the priorities and needs of the communities we support. Any operating surplus serves educational and scholarly objectives, through reinvestment in publishing and educational programs and as financial returns to publishing partners”. I feel this is an important distinction to make in our choice of journals to support through submissions, reviewing and editing. In addition to a change in the EiC as of 2025, we have a few other changes amongst the Associate Editors who help create, shepherd and foster the scientific content of the Journal of Plankton Research. We are welcoming two new AEs. Hans Dam of the University of Connecticut will join us to cover primarily marine plankton ecology and evolution. Covering my former AE position with more of a freshwater focus is Lars-Anders Hansson from Lund University. Our continuing oceanography AEs are Lisa Campbell (Texas A&M University, based out of Kailua, HI) and Marja Koski (Technical University of Denmark). Xabier Irigoien has retired from his position as AE in 2024 and we thank him for his years of service. You can follow the updates to the entire JPR Editorial Board at the journal site here: https://academic.oup.com/plankt/pages/Editorial_Board I am very much looking forward to working with you all in my new role. We are always looking for new ideas for Horizons articles (short, provocative reviews) or for special topic issues. If you have suggestions on these, or on how we might improve JPR, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I sincerely hope that collectively, we can ensure that the Journal of Plankton Research remains a central repository for global plankton knowledge from the smallest scales to the planetary one.

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