Best Publishing Practices and Open Access Options at The American Naturalist | The American Naturalist

"The American Naturalist has made a range of improvements to its publishing model in recent years, some of which we would like to highlight here. As a nonprofit society journal, we firmly believe that our role is to help foster a healthy publishing landscape that is designed to serve the needs of our scientific community. As part of this mission, in 2023 we switched from a voluntary to a mandatory double anonymous review process to reduce the possible implicit biases that can arise during peer review further. We are constantly diversifying our reviewer pool and editorial board to ensure that we maintain expertise in foundational and cutting-edge topics and increase the breadth and depth of the science we publish. Additionally, in some cases authors change their names after publication for a variety of reasons; we have made this process easy for our authors. Furthermore, to foster the visibility of their research beyond the English-speaking world, authors have the opportunity to publish secondary abstracts in a language other than English....

we have two basic options that meet the requirements of major funding agencies.

Green open access (our no-cost option) refers to the ability of authors to self-archive their work and make it freely available through institutional or disciplinary repositories. In practice, this simply means that authors may deposit the final accepted version of the manuscript after peer review in a noncommercial repository. Depending on the funder’s requirement, an embargo period and different license options can be selected (see our website for details). In addition, authors can also deposit the published PDF in such a repository after a 12-month embargo period. Most universities, institutes, and funding bodies have repositories designed explicitly for this purpose. This option is a straightforward way to make everyone’s research open access completely for free. It also currently covers the open access requirements of major funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States and Plan S (cOAlition S) in Europe.

Alternatively, authors can request gold open access...."