Ecological Monographs

The pages of Ecological Monographs are open to integrative original research papers and synthetic reviews. As a condition for publication of a manuscript in Ecological Monographs, all data associated with the results reported in manuscripts must be made available in a permanent, publicly accessible data archive or repository.Policy for manuscripts submitted on or after January 1, 2011. [more]

Submissions to Ecological Monographs should be accompanied by a detailed cover letter outlining the content of the manuscript and discussing how the work meets the new goals of the journal. Although authors should identify the ESA journal to which a manuscript is being submitted, the final decision as to which ESA journal an accepted manuscript is published rests with the Editors-in-Chief and the Managing Editor.

Papers submitted to Ecological Monographs will be examined carefully to ensure that they meet the goals and scope of the journal. Manuscripts sent out for review will be handled by the Editor-in-Chief or by members of the editorial boards of Ecology and Ecological Applications.

Articles for Ecological Monographs are generally over 50 manuscript pages (16 printed pages). Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words.

Articles published in Ecological Monographs are original research papers documenting complex, original observational, experimental, or theoretical studies that by their very integrated nature defy dissolution into shorter publications focused on a single topic or message. The latter are more appropriately submitted to Ecology or Ecological Applications. Articles shorter than 15.0 printed pages may be published in Ecology at the discretion of the Managing Editor.

Reviews should be comprehensive and synthetic papers that establish new benchmarks in the field, define directions for future research, contribute to fundamental understanding of ecological principles, and whenever possible, derive principles for ecological management in its broadest sense (including, but not limited to: conservation, mitigation, restoration, and pro-active protection of the environment). Reviews should be more than simple compilations of facts and overviews of the literature. Rather than focusing only on the recent literature and highlighting trendy topics, Reviews should reflect the development of a topic and encompass relevant natural history, observational and experimental data, analyses, models, and theory.

Concepts & Synthesis. The Concepts and Synthesis section publishes papers that conceptually advance the field of ecology. These papers are expected to go well beyond works being reviewed and include discussion of new directions, new syntheses, and resolutions of old questions.

Data Policy. As a condition for publication of a manuscript in Ecological Monographs, all data associated with the results reported in manuscripts must be made available in a permanent, publicly accessible data archive or repository. Examples of permanent data repositories include GenBank for DNA sequences (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), Ecological Archives (http://esapubs.org/archive/) for basic ASCII tables, and ORNL-DAAC (http://daac.ornl.gov/) for biogeochemical data. Ecological Monographs also is a partner with Dryad (http://datadryad.org/), which provides a flexible platform for a wide variety of digital data. With the exception of material submitted to Ecological Archives, data do not have to be archived at the time of manuscript submission, only following acceptance of the manuscript for publication.

Archived data should be sufficiently complete so that subsequent users can (1) reconstruct tables, graphs, and statistical analyses reported in the original publication, and (2) derive summary statistics necessary for new analyses or meta-analyses. Thus, the normal resolution of the data that are archived will be at the level of individual observations. Truly “raw” data, such as scanned pages from field notebooks, complete video streams, or traces of Markov chain Monte Carlo runs rarely will be required. Sensitive information, such as precise locality data for rare, threatened, or endangered species, or identity of human subjects, should be redacted as required. Sufficient metadata should accompany the data file so that others can readily use files and interpret variables, including their units. Such metadata can usually be provided in a short text file.

All accepted manuscripts that were submitted to Ecological Monographs after 1 January 2014 will be assessed a $50 data curation and archiving fee. The fee will cover the cost to deposit data associated with Ecological Monographs manuscripts at Dryad.

See the general ESA Data Policy.