A cross-post

In my capacity as (soon-to-be) Editor-In-Chief of The American Naturalist, I am also occasionally going to be posting on the AmNat Editor's Desk blog. Here, I'm just drawing attention to two new posts I put on that site.

1) As incoming EIC I wanted to articulate some aspects of AmNat's values and policies for our Associate Editors. They received a version of this by email. But I realized some of the points may be more broadly applicable, and useful to prospective authors as well. So, I also posted this as an open letter for anyone to read. You can read the full text here.  Contents include some thoughts about:
- What the heck does AmNat publish (or not publish)?
- How fast should decisions be?
- When to decline without review?
- When to "decline without prejudice", and what exactly does that mean?
- When to send a revision back out to review, or not?
- The importance of value-added comments by Associate Editors' decision letters
- Special Features in The American Naturalist
- Progress in diversifying the AE board, thanks to Judie Bronstein and to be continued.

2) This fall I had an extended conversation with Tim Parker from Whitman College, who is Co-organizer of the “Tools for Transparency in Ecology and Evolution” group. In this blog post I provide a summary of the TTEE standards and what AmNat will or will not do, to meet them.

While we are on the topic of this journal, here's an item of historical interest: a screen shot of the announcement in the 1960's when page charges were first instituted, to avoid having the journal go bankrupt and disappear.




Enjoy!

-Dan Bolnick