Introduction, Establishment, Invasion, Accommodation: innovation and disruption in biogeographic publishing

Author(s): Dawson, Michael N; Field, Richard; Hortal, Joaquin; Stigall, Alycia L. | Abstract: Frontiers of Biogeography launched eight years ago, merging the missions of a newsletter and a book, to deliver a series of integrative and interdisciplinary volumes to a diverse community of biogeographers. The journal purposefully was pitched as a 'magazine' aiming to distinguish itself from existing biogeography journals with syntheses and prospectives that would push forward the boundaries of biogeography philosophy and practice. Here, we review the development of the journal since 2009, we survey the journal's current niche in the biogeography publishing ecosystem, and we look forward to changes in the coming year(s) that will further advance our mission to enhance your biogeographical research.


Innovation
Full gold libre open access has been a distinctive characteristic of the journal from its very beginning, and was only the first of several innovations in biogeographic publishing. In the same year, Frontiers of Biogeography sponsored the MacArthur & Wilson Award together with the IBS 1 , the first award offered by a biogeography journal for early career researchers; something mimicked by Ecography in 2015 2 . In 2014 we introduced our first short-form research "Correspondence" 3 (Ecography introduced "Brevia" later the same year 4 ), and we struck out at the other end of the spectrum introducing "Monographs" in the subsequent issue (Lomolino and Field 2014). The introduction of "Monographs," particularly, signals the flexibility we have as a fully online society owned and run journal with an open-access model to innovate beyond the bounds of traditional subscription-based or publishing house-based journals. This flexibility has allowed us to differentiate rather than compete even as we added more traditional research article types . During this period, the readership of Frontiers tripled ( Fig. 1), copy increased (Fig. 2), and since 2016 the journal is listed with Scopus, confirming establishment of the journal in the publishing landscape.

Invasion or accommodation
The question before us is what does the future hold for Frontiers of Biogeography? Has it reached its stable state, as might be interpreted from Fig.  1? Or has the past biennial concluded a period of consolidation before further growth (Fig. 2)? For sure, they have been interesting times, as Frontiers of Biogeography has emerged during a time of massive reorganization of the publishing land-scape, including the introduction and growth of open access publishing.
The expansion of open access publishing is epitomized by PLoS ONE from 2006 through 2013, and mirrored by many other journals, including instant successes building on the Nature brand. Unfortunately an increasing number of "predatory" open access journals, which are blurring the line between authentic and inauthentic scientific publishing (Carey 2016), are becoming harder to identify (Straumsheim 2017a); those 'predatory' practices highlight the value of journals run by scientific societies of known integrity, such as Frontiers of Biogeography by the IBS. With increasing competition, metrics-driven publishing behavior, and increases in pay-to-publish fees, PLoS ONE has suffered a considerable decline in submissions and publications in recent years (Straumsheim 2017b). The declining trend is visible also in biogeography papers in PLoS ONE (Fig.  2a).
Amid this dynamic landscape, Frontiers of Biogeography has hewed to its initial philosophical and moral underpinnings to provide a quality publishing option for all biogeographers, combining "the benefits of an established … journal and those of Open Access … [at] low or no cost to the author and zero cost for readers" (Dawson et al. 2012:1). Frontiers of Biogeography has grown steadily doing so, which (in addition to flexibility in article types, and a supportive process ]) may be another luxury for society journals run by the community for the community. The longer-term picture of publishing in Frontiers of Biogeography shows continued growth, and one can easily imagine extrapolating from the current state to the kinds of growth of the four main biogeography journals over the past four decades (Fig. 2b). But the question remains open as to whether Frontiers of Biogeography will grow and displace or grow and be accommodated.

Disruption
Although it might seem a peculiar claim, we suggest that commitment to our core philosophy of quality affordable open access biogeography delivered by the IBS is a strategy that bucks current publishing trends. As noted above, this is different from the predominant model of for-profit publishing, whether it is pay-to-view or pay-to-publish, and runs counter to the recent shift towards partnerships between societies and for-profit publishers (e.g., Ecological Society of America, Society for the Study of Evolution). So we are pleased to introduce a suite of new initiatives, on which we have been working with the IBS for the past year and which will be rolled out in the coming months.
The first, and representing the journal's next transformation, is the metamorphosis of our butterfly logo with this first issue of volume 9 (see cover; Fig. 3); the landscape over which it now flies emphasizes the journal's connection with the IBS. Another change at the head of the journal is the addition of Alycia Stigall to the chief editorial team, bringing strengths in paleobiology and marine biogeography, two areas that we are enthusiastic to grow alongside our more established areas. Among the Section Editors, we welcome Sal Keith as the new book reviews editor; she will take over from Markus Eichhorn mid-year. Carsten Meyer and Cascade Sorte join our growing roster of outstanding Associate Editors.
The expanded team will enact further changes to facilitate publication and reduce timeconsuming redundant steps in the publication process. As one example, Frontiers of Biogeography encourages continuity in editorial process even across journals by welcoming prior reviews with modified manuscripts following rejection elsewhere, thus maintaining a continuous chain of constructive feedback and review. Similar mechanisms exist at other journals, for example referral from Wiley's flagship biogeography journals to Wiley's pay-to-publish open-access journals; however, Frontiers of Biogeography has comparable impact and far lower costs-an attractive alternative. We also encourage submission of manuscripts recommended by Peerage of Science 5 and PCI Evolutionary Biology 6 . And in the cases when post-submission review is required, we try to balance timely with rigorous review, routinely offering our peers a month to review but allowing more time when needed.
Other changes to look forward to include sponsorship for workshops including publication of special issues in Frontiers of Biogeography; we  (Lomolino & Heaney 2004), was an artist's rendering of Bernard Cahill's 1909 "butterfly map" of the world, one of many projects to transform Earth's sphere into a planar surface. Frontiers' new logo feeds on the theme created for the new IBS corporate image, and represents four overlapping hypervolumes in the form of a butterfly's wings, flying over four niche response curves in the form of hills, mountains and the sea. This change is a metaphor for the substantial transformation that biogeography has undergone from over a century of growth, from describing geographical patterns to studying the shifting balance of processes that shape aspects of biodiversity in different realms, such as species niches, dispersal, ecological interactions, and evolutionary processes. trialed this 5 years ago with great success (Castilho et al. 2013) and look forward to its return. We also will build the editorial officehopefully providing more behind-the-scenes publishing experiences for early-career IBS members as editorial office staff, copyeditors, and layout specialists, in addition to reviewers and guest editors. For both sponsorship and vacancies, check our Announcements section in the current and upcoming issues.
Looking farther ahead, in 2018, we plan to transition to an HTML-based journal format, which will increase visibility of published articles to web crawlers and scrapers. A full-fledged journal article authoring and document management submission system, with similarities to Editoria™ 7 , also is in the works. This is part of a collaborative partnership between eScholarship and Coko 7 to reimagine scholarly publishing in the digital era. The project anticipates a streamlined and flexible publication process that eases production of more interactive, rich, publications. Frontiers of Biogeography is enthusiastic about these developments and bringing to bear a wider range of graphics, hooks, and media for communicating your science; we imagine, for example, post-publication online commentary via blogs and twitter that complements pre-publication review, streaming video and audio (e.g., for soundscapes; Lomolino et al. 2015), and interactive annotated graphics that can be reconfigured and zoomed.
The future of biogeography publishing: you IBS President Dov Sax outlined a vision for Frontiers of Biogeography during his inaugural address in Tucson, January 2017, and we look forward to working with the IBS and other members of an expanded team to realize that vision in the coming year. Among the most important members of this team is you, the biogeography author, whom we encourage to submit work for publication: our goal is to provide you with service that enhances your publication opportunities, including for works that may not fit into the top-tier biogeogra-phy journals. Through flexible categories of publication, an editorial team that cares about you because it is like you, and adoption of the most favorable innovations in publishing, we aim to make publishing your research in your journal easier.
Indeed, it is your involvement as authors that will really ensure that the next stage of Frontiers of Biogeography is not merely accommodation in its existing place, but rather a creative invasion of the publishing landscape-a rising profile that directly or indirectly continues to encourage innovation and change in related journals too. The future of Frontiers of Biogeography also lies in your hands-as reviewers, readers, citers, and members of the editorial team-for which roles we again call on all biogeographers early-, mid-, and late-career alike. Considering that Frontiers of Biogeography wishes primarily to be a vehicle for your success, we are delighted to showcase again, in this issue, more of the new generation of biogeography researchers emerging at the most recent meeting of the IBS (Bishop 2017, Gerstner 2017, Kennedy 2017