© 2008 Society of Systematic Biologists
The Expanding Contributions of Systematic Biology
Moscow, Idaho, 30 November 2007
When I became editor of Systematic Biology, my number one priority was not to "break it." My predecessor, Chris Simon, handed me a journal in great shape, and I rapidly became conscious of the responsibility of editing a journal that takes considerable pride in its reputation as the leading journal in the field. Luckily, the task of being editor is made much less onerous thanks to the efforts of the team of associate editors, the diligence of referees, and in particular the hard work of Debbie Ciszek, our managing editor. The book review section has benefited from David Morrison's tireless efforts in securing reviews for each issue of the journal. Chris Simon also provided helpful advice as I found my feet, and in her role as chair of the publications committee dealt with two vital tasks, finding the next editor (of whom more below) and negotiating contracts with publishers.
The biggest operational change during my tenure was how the journal handled manuscript submissions. When I became editor, Systematic Biology received most of its manuscripts by e-mail. For somebody like myself with a perpetually overflowing and chaotic inbox, this posed a considerable organization challenge (which I largely dealt with by relying on Debbie Ciszek to keep me from forgetting manuscripts). By 2006 we had moved to the widely used Web-based submission tool Manuscript Central. This transition was relatively smooth, largely due to the considerable effort Debbie put into ensuring that Manuscript Central mirrored our existing practice. Although the automated reminders generated by Manuscript Central can seem impersonal and, at times, nagging (it is reminding me of my own tardiness as I write this), it has greatly simplified the editorial process.
The inexorable march of the Web has had other impacts on the Society's public face. In early 2005, I ported the old Web site to the content management system Drupal (http://drupal.org). As a consequence, it is now easier for Society officers to update the site with information about Society matters, jobs, conferences, or publications of interest. In addition, the Web site (http://www.systbiol.org) displays a number of news feeds such as tables of contents from other journals in the field, blogs, and social bookmarking services such as the Nature Publishing Group's Connotea (http://www.connotea.org). This ensures that the site is constantly updated without requiring human intervention. Although the site essentially runs itself, Ruedi Birenheide has provided invaluable technical support to keep it functioning smoothly.
In addition to being a forum for the Society, the Web site also acts as a repository for data sets and supplementary materials for each issue of the journal. Much of the relevant data are deposited in databases such as GenBank and TreeBASE (http://www.treebase.org), but not all of the material associated with a paper is appropriate for those databases. There are specialized databases, such as Morphbank (http://www.morphbank.net/) for images and Morphobank (http://www.morphobank.geongrid.org/) for morphological data that will be increasingly important, but there is still no home for much of the semistructured data generated by a study (such as Excel spreadsheets of specimens sampled, tables of alternative dates for nodes in trees, or appendices containing mathematical proofs or algorithms). Our Web site does store these, but is vulnerable to the classic problems of persistence (if we reorganize the site, many of the links to the files may change) and findability (we don't provide an easy means to search for specific files). In the United States, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) (http://www.nescent.org) is sponsoring Digital Repository of Information and Data for Evolution (DRIADE), which aims to provide a persistent repository for data underlying published studies in evolutionary biology. Such a repository would help ensure that data supporting a study are not lost.
The issue of data availability was one that I raised in my introductory editorial at the start of my tenure as editor (Simon and Page, 2005). Looking over that essay makes me shudder a little—some of the issues raised there are still with us, notably Open Access. Journals such as PLoS Biology PLoS One, and the BMC journals are flourishing and attracting a growing number of authors. Yet for a society journal such as ours, Open Access is just beginning.
In addition to the vital core of high-quality empirical and theoretical papers that make Systematic Biology a "must read" journal for systematists, the journal has maintained its role as a forum for discussion. DNA barcoding has attracted much attention, exemplified by the debate organized and reported on by Smith (2005) in the October 2005 issue. When it was published, this issue generated a fivefold increase in traffic on the Society's Web site. The issues raised in the debate are still topical, but in addition to "Points of View" pieces, the Journal has published insightful investigations of the strengths and limitations of automated methods of delimiting taxa.
One area I enjoyed seeing flourish was the development of new methods of visualization, such as Janies et al.'s (2007) use of Google Earth to display the spread of the avian flu virus. Phylogeneticists are tackling increasingly large amounts of data, often obtained from diverse sources, which raises issues about workflows to automate handling of large data sets (e.g., Hibbett et al., 2005), and developing more sophisticated methods of linking data together (e.g., Ramírez, et al., 2007). I expect that these areas will see further exciting developments.
When Chris handed over the reins to me, she also passed on some sage advice: "The first duty as editor is to find your replacement." The journal is fortunate to have a systematist of the caliber of Jack Sullivan as its new editor. Jack has been one of the most thorough associate editors I have worked with, which made him an obvious candidate for becoming editor (current associate editors may note with concern that doing your job well may be "rewarded" with an offer that cannot be refused...). I think Jack will bring a combination of rigor and experience to the position, and I hope he enjoys it as much as I have. For, above all else, it has been a great experience editing Systematic Biology, and I am grateful for the having had the opportunity.
—Roderic D. M. Page, Glasgow, Scotland, 27 November 2007
It is a tremendous honor to be able to serve the Society of Systematic Biologists as editor-in-chief of Systematic Biology. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the Society, and in particular the joy in discovery that is so evident among our membership, reignited my interest in a career in the discipline at a time when it seemed to me that science was all about strength of assertion. It has been tremendous to see the journal flourish under the editors who have served throughout my career and Rod has certainly done more than "not break it." In addition to leading the journal to its record impact, he has been outstanding in shepherding the journal though a number of changes, with the migration to Manuscript Central being merely the most visible. On behalf the entire Society, I thank Rod for his tremendous efforts not only as editor, but also as Web master; I'm especially grateful he has graciously agreed to retain the latter role.
I also want to thank Debbie Ciszek for the unbelievable amount of work she does. I know that Rod and Chris are aware of this, but I suspect most Society members would be startled at how critical she is to the functioning of the journal. I would be pulling my hair out already were it not for the outstanding job she does as managing editor.
We find ourselves at a time when the exuberance of the early 1990s has continued unabated; evolution and systematics have become more relevant across all the life sciences. This centrality is perhaps most newly evident in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics, which, along with the inherently (and insanely) complex parameter spaces we routinely encounter, has attracted an increasingly diverse array of scientists to systematics, including mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. Although this is undoubtedly energizing our discipline, it has also led to the submission of an increasingly diverse array of manuscripts. I hope that we, as an editorial staff, can facilitate the process of folding the diverse traditions of these fields into the future of systematics.
As the keystone nature of systematics to life sciences has become more ingrained, the impact factor of the journal has been reaching new heights. This confluence has led to a record number of submissions and, as a consequence, a slight decline in the acceptance rate. This is a fact of life that we'll all have to deal with. In fact, within the last year (and for the first time in my career), I had a paper rejected from the journal and I had to publish it elsewhere. It's both funny and ironic that this didn't happen until after I had become editor-elect (and therefore started handling all new submissions). The up side is that, as the incoming editor-in-chief, this reinforces my confidence in how our journal operates.
Nevertheless, as well as the journal has been functioning, I think we can continue to make improvements, particularly with respect to turnaround time. Although we can't do too much to decrease the time a manuscript spends in review, we can certainly decrease our time to online publication.
I very much look forward to the next few years, and am excited about the advances in systematic biology that we can glimpse emerging. For example, we're beginning to have a better mathematical understanding of the conditions that can lead to nonidentifiability of topologies. We're also beginning to address how to conduct analyses on the phylogenomic scale with issues such as supertree construction, mixed and partitioned models, and perhaps most excitingly, inferring species trees from a collection of incongruent gene trees using coalescent modeling. I also look forward to the development of innovative ways of using distributions of trees to make evolutionary inferences (rather than basing inferences on a single point estimate of the topology). The journal has an obvious role as the leading outlet for such studies, but neither should we focus so much on the emerging theory and methodology that we are no longer the first choice for researchers who conduct leading empirical phylogenetics.
I think this is a difficult balance to strike, but it is one that the journal has successfully maintained throughout its history. We're very fortunate that many of the previous slate of associate editors, along with many of their editorial board members, have agreed to serve another term. I thank them profusely, as I do those associate editors whose terms of service are coming to an end.
—Jack Sullivan, Moscow, Idaho, 30 November 2007
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Hibbett D. R., Nilsson R. H., Snyder M., Fonseca M., Costanzo C., Shonfeld M. Automated phylogenetic taxonomy: An example in the Homobasidiomycetes (mushroom-forming fungi). Syst. Biol. (2005) 54:660–668. http://dx.di.org/10.1080/10635150590947104.
Janies D., Hill A. W., Guralnick R., Habib F., Waltari E., Wheeler W. C. Genomic analysis and geographic visualization of the spread of avian influenza (H5N1). Syst. Biol. (2007) 56:321–329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10635150701266848.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
Ramírez M. J., Coddington J. A., Maddison W. P., Midford P. E., Prendini L., Miller J., Griswold C. E., Hormiga G., Sierwald P., Scharff N., Benjamin S. P., Wheeler W. C. Linking of digital images to phylogenetic data matrices using a morphological ontology. Syst. Biol. (2007) 56:283–294.
Simon C., Page R. D. M. The past and the future of Systematic Biology. Syst. Biol. (2005) 54:1–3. http://dx.doi.org/dx.doi.org/10.1080/10635150590930463.
Smith V. S. DNA barcoding: Perspectives from a "Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy" (PEET) debate. Syst. Biol. (2005) 54:841–844.
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