Eiji Numata
I assumed the position of Editor-in-Chief of Zoological Science on January 1, 2020, succeeding Dr. Takuma Fukatsu. Thirty-six years have already passed since the journal was first published in 1984. I believe that the reason the journal has maintained its standing as an international academic journal in the field of zoology is thanks to the dedicated efforts of our predecessors in the Zoological Society of Japan. Although with limited ability, I previously served as a Division Editor and Reviewing Editor (equivalent to the current Associate Editor) under Editors-in-Chief Norio Suzuki and Hitoshi Michibata from 2002 to 2004, and under Yoshitaka Oka from 2007 to 2010. Now, I am returning to editorial involvement as Editor-in-Chief after a long absence. As the editorial committee, we have asked five Associate Editors (Hiroshi Kajihara, Jun Kitano, Mikiko Tanaka, Masato Nikaido, and Susumu Hyodo) to continue in their roles, and have welcomed five new members (Takako Shigaraki, Takafumi Nakano, Toru Miura, Manabu Yoshida, and Ken Yoda). Our Editorial Assistant is Yuri Matsubayashi. Although we are a smaller team compared to the past, we aim to provide meticulous and consistent service.
I do not feel the need to do anything special just because a new editorial board has been established. Our primary goal is to continue maintaining the standing that our predecessors have built. At the same time, over the past 36 years, there have been intense domestic and international developments surrounding academic publishing, and the landscape is still changing. When I first handled editorial duties, paper manuscripts and review reports were sent back and forth by mail, but nowadays an electronic submission system is in operation. And there have been major changes beyond just the editorial methods. The biggest change was the launch of Zoological Letters, another academic journal, by the Zoological Society of Japan in 2015. Like Zoological Science, Zoological Letters is an international academic journal covering a broad range of zoology, but its character as a journal is different, being an electronic-only journal with no print edition and all published articles being open access. Therefore, we are forced to be more conscious than ever of what constitutes a paper characteristic of Zoological Science, and cooperation will likely be necessary so that both Zoological Letters and Zoological Science can develop together.
In Zoological Science, the journal I first helped edit in 2002, the fields with the highest number of published papers were Physiology and Endocrinology, tying for first and together accounting for 27% of the total. By 2019, however, Diversity and Evolution and Ecology took the top spots, combining for 39% of the total, while Physiology and Endocrinology dropped to a combined 9%. While it is natural for popular academic fields to shift over time, and some fields may not choose Zoological Science as their publication venue as often, this change is nonetheless somewhat extreme. It is also surprising that there are so many papers in the Ecology field, given the relatively small number of presentation abstracts in that area at the annual meeting. While we certainly hope to attract even more submissions from fields currently producing a high volume of papers, I also want to consider strategies for winning back submissions from the fields that once served as the backbone of Zoological Science.
Finally, I have one piece of good news. A recognized issue with Zoological Science has been the matter of pre-publication access. Many journals publish electronic versions before the official print publication under names such as Early View or Online First. For a long time, our journal was unable to do this, but since 2016 we have managed it through a somewhat complicated method of publishing pre-publication manuscripts as Early View on Zoodiversity Web. It has now finally been decided that pre-publication manuscripts will be published on the Zoological Science website under the name Issue-In-Progress. This will not only improve convenience for both authors and readers, but should also increase citations shortly after publication, leading to a rise in the impact factor.
