Year: 2024
Type: editorial
Abstract: Welcome to 2024 at Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE). After a few turbulent years due to the Covid pandemic, this last year has felt relatively normal. Last summer, the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), the society that owns this journal, ran its annual meeting in person, and the number of submissions to GBE has returned to pre-pandemic levels. We have also been able to launch new initiatives and analyze data on GBE outcomes. During the last year, we have instituted several policies that we are proud of, as they reflect our values and those of SMBE. First, we have become one of the first journals to check Data Availability statements for each published manuscript; we require all primary data to be placed in the public domain, and we encourage authors to also deposit secondary data, such as alignments. Prior to instituting this policy, we found that approximately 30% of all primary data in GBE articles was not publicly available despite the fact that a Data Availability statement had been required for several years. However, we recognize that no system is perfect, and we will continue to respond when readers identify issues related to the availability of data in GBE manuscripts. Like many academic societies, SMBE is concerned about “parachute” science—when scientists, usually from the global North, use samples from other countries that they are not residents in, without any attempt to involve local scientists and/or to give back to local communities. We have taken a small step toward eliminating this practice by requesting that submitting authors who have collected samples from foreign countries report on their compliance with the Nagoya Protocol and their efforts to use materials in a fair and responsible manner. We also invite authors to add a sentence on this topic in their manuscripts, either within the Materials and Methods or Acknowledgement sections. At GBE, we are committed to inclusion and diversity, and as part of this, we have been monitoring journal practices as a function of gender. Two years ago, we published the first analysis in this series, which demonstrated that rates of acceptance and rejection were not influenced by the inferred gender of the first and last author (Eyre-Walker and Katz 2022). We have now extended this analysis to consider the time to first decision, the number of reviewer requests, and the number of rounds of revision. For this analysis, we considered all manuscripts that were submitted to GBE from 2019 onward; this is the year that the current editors took over as editors-in-chief. We assigned gender using the genderize.io software (https://genderize.io). We find that the time to first decision is very similar for female (mean = 28.5 d) and male (30.6) first authors and is not significantly different (2-sample t-test, P = 0.11); a similar pattern holds for the perceived gender of the last author (30.0 vs. 29.8 d for females and males respectively; t-test P = 0.27). The number of revisions is likewise very similar for male and female first and last authors (mean number of revisions for all categories = 0.70, no significant differences using t-tests). The number of reviewer requests is slightly, but not significantly, lower for female first authors (2.81 requests on average) versus male first authors (2.99; t-test P = 0.98). For the last authors, the mean number of requests for females is 2.98, which is not significantly greater than for males (2.91; t-test P = 0.77). Based on these data, the journal appears to be blind to gender in these aspects of its function. This is something we will continue to monitor going forward. Several analyses have shown that male authors tend to be cited more often than females (Larivière et al. 2013; Chatterjee and Werner 2021), though neither the data nor their explanations are simple. To investigate whether gender plays a role in the number of citations at GBE, we considered all articles published since our first issue in 2009 until the first issue of 2022. We excluded editorials, highlight articles, and errata but considered all other article types including research articles (2,155), letters (256), genome reports (179), reviews (54), perspectives (17), and genome resources (12). As above, we assigned gender using the genderize.io software (https://genderize.io). We considered the number of citations to the article across 2 time frames: within the year, the article was published and either 2 or 5 yr after the publication year, depending on the year of publication. We analyzed data for both first and last author names. We find that female first authors are cited 11% less often than male first authors (8.29 vs. 9.27, t-test P < 0.008) over the 2-year period following the publication; this effect becomes slightly attenuated over the 5-year time frame, when the rate at which female first authors are cited is 8% lower than that of males, an effect that is not significant (22.02 vs. 23.95, t-test P = 0.11). There is no significant effect of gender of the last author on the rate of citations over either the 2-year (8.58 vs. 9.03, t-test P = 0.30) or 5-year (22.29 vs. 23.57, t-test P = 0.36) time frames. The distribution of citation counts is skewed to low values; however, none of these results are affected by transforming the data. We therefore conclude that citations to GBE articles are largely independent of gender. We are looking forward to new initiatives in 2024. This year represents the 40th anniversary of our sister journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE); the foundation of the journal led to the formation of the SMBE and then the foundation of this journal in 2009. To celebrate this occasion, GBE and MBE will be publishing a series of perspectives, one for each month alternating between journals, along with a virtual edition of each journal. The virtual edition will contain a selection of papers that each journal has published on each topic. The first GBE perspective, by Nicolas Galtier on the neutralist–selectionist debate, will appear in this edition and will be followed by articles on microbial genomics, endosymbiosis, extremophiles, and mobile genetic elements. This year, we will be publishing 3 special sections, 2 that arose from symposia at the SMBE annual meeting, and 1 that will follow on from an SMBE satellite meeting. This builds from efforts over the past few years to publish special sections in GBE that unite research papers that share a common theme. Going forward, we will continue to invite the organizers from all SMBE symposia and meetings to submit proposals for a special section, and we are open to suggestions from the community. Also, we are keen to increase the diversity of the readership and the editorial board. As part of this, we encourage authors to submit translations of their abstracts to be included within supplementary materials. We finish with a call to the community to submit your papers to society-owned journals such as GBE and MBE or another journal owned by an academic society. We are published by Oxford University Press, which is a not-for-profit publisher, a contrast with the for-profit nature of many of our “competing” journals. Both GBE and MBE are open-access journals and as a consequence levy an article publication charge (although we have a generous waiver policy). However, all of our publication charges go toward publishing the journals or supporting the activities of the society. In 2023, SMBE used the resulting funds to support our annual meeting through subsidies, travel grants, caregiver awards, onsite child care, and much more.
Source: Genome Biology and Evolution
DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evae012
Authors: Adam Eyre-Walker, Laura A Katz
Institutions: University of Sussex, Smith College
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,992
OpenAlex ID: W4391592791