Eco-Evo Evo-Eco: Towards a new path for academic societies and the scientific discourse

" I am herewith using my farewell opportunity to reflect upon my experiences as EiC of our by now ‘traditional’ society journal. JEB was launched in Switzerland, in close link with the foundation of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), around the time when I undertook my PhD in the mid 1980s (see Stearns, 1987). Admittedly, compared to some considerably older societies and journals in our field of research, such as Evolution or American Naturalist, this tradition is not longstanding – and I fear may not last as long. This is because scientific journals, particularly society journals, are in peril as they have largely lost their function. Scientific articles are no longer printed and physically stored in libraries to peruse; instead, they are anchored somewhere in the World Wide Web for everybody to openly access in principle. Although the publishers and editors of JEB, like many other journals, have been working hard in recent years to ease manuscript submission and reviewing procedures for the benefit of authors (see Blanckenhorn,2021), we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in scientific publishing towards ‘Open Science’, fostered by a technological shift that may well make scientific journals superfluous in the long term. This drive towards Open Science particularly threatens the traditional copyright business model of scientific publishing, but also the established mode of operation of most scientific societies, many of which, as a rule and among other things, have established and run flagship journals to disseminate and communicate their scientific disciplines, not least also to co-finance their activities (see this article for a historical summary). So it is perhaps unsurprising that academic societies and editorial boards of their journals are keen on holding on to our traditional modus operandi in the face of this ongoing transformation, while at the same time seeing their journals wilt. Nevertheless, during my 4-year tenure as JEB EiC it has become clear at least to me, but also many others, that many aspects of the production of science must and will change, and that we should facilitate rather than resist these developments...."