Global Ecology and Conservation: Why is a new journal needed"

Elsevier has just launched a new open-access journal, GECCO, and I'm pleased to join their first Editorial Board.

Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Richard Corlett, asks "Why is a new journal needed?"

"The explosive growth in global scientific output in recent years has pushed rejection rates in the most popular journals in ecology and conservation to more than 80%. This not only wastes a great deal of time, effort, and other resources, but unless this work is published elsewhere it also biases reviews and meta-analyses towards ‘stronger’, and thus more publishable, results. Meanwhile conservation practitioners get only a partial picture of what is known about the species and ecosystems they manage. An additional problem is that the quest for ‘novelty’ in scientific publishing makes it almost impossible to publish geographical replicates of previous studies, despite the value of these to science. GECCO is intended to address these issues by providing an outlet for good science that does not necessarily meet the exacting requirements of the top journals. "