This hasn’t been officially announced yet, but I learned about it last week and it’s not really a secret given that Nature is already advertising for editors (here and here) for a new journal whose description is in the second ad:
Nature Ecology and Evolution — the latest member of the Nature family — will be published from January 2017, and we are now looking for editors to complete its launch team. The journal will publish the most significant research across the breadth of whole-organism and environmental biology, and will bring together all of the sub-disciplines of ecology and evolution, including palaeontology, molecular evolution and conservation biology.
We are now recruiting scientists from ecology- and evolution-related disciplines to become Associate or Senior Editors. This is a rare and exciting opportunity to help shape and launch a new academic journal. Candidates must have a PhD in a relevant discipline, and preferably postdoctoral experience, with a strong research record.
This will be a must-read journal for those of us in the field, and it’s also an opportunity for those interested in editing a good journal to apply for jobs now.
It will make the ‘impossible to keep up with all the fascinating developments’ even more difficult – but in a good way!
Exciting!
Excellent news! No chance PCC will be applying for a job?
No, but I wouldn’t mind reviewing books for them.
Reviewing papers too?
Sub!
I’m sure we have to pay for the sub though. :-/
[But I haz a university library en route to home! :-)]
Sadly, it’s likely to be very expensive, like all other Nature publication.
One wonders what their charges for publishing an article for “Open Access” will be. Probably, as you say, high.
More good articles behind paywalls?! I doubt if science will improve just because Nature launches a new journal.
Great news, but I never really understood why universities and publishers insist on putting ecology and evolution under one roof? Why not evolution and genetics? For instance, you are a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, yet your research has much more in common with genetics than with ecology. I just find it interesting that there are very few Departments in Evolution and Genetics out there. After all, genetics played much bigger role in development of modern evolutionary theory.
There are journals that have ‘evolution and genetics’ bent as well.
At times I find it amusing to see how some departments would get a little convoluted about their names. Like ‘Department of Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution’. Or ‘Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy’.
Ecology and evolution are put under one roof because ecology is the source of the natural selection that gives rise to adaptations in all their splendor. As it turns out, we have IMHO a much deeper understanding of genetics (and many journals that treat it) than how ecology acts (or doesn’t) to modify genotypes and phenotypes to produce and ‘perfect’ concrete adaptations.
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, a firm believer in natural selection, coined the term “ecology” in 1866. This is how Haeckel contextualized it in a talk given 1869:
“As concerns ‘Relations Physiology’, i.e., the study of the relations of the animal organism to the external world, this in turn falls into two segments, ecology and chorology [biogeography]. By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including, above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.”
The above quote was taken from an introductory epigraph of “Introduction to Animal Ecology”, a 1949 ecology text coauthored by five eminent ecologists of the “University of Chicago school.”
Thanks for that–very interesting! I had no idea the term was that old, much less that Haeckel coined it!
Quite interesting. I wasn’t aware of this. Thanks!
Love the idea. No more seeking out a journal for just one article. More importantly, it would seem to allow for several more Nature articles on E & E published per year.