The Ecological Society of America (ESA) is a scientific society that, for more than a century, has worked to advance the science of ecology and support the community of ecologists throughout their careers. From August 10 to 15, ESA's 2025 Annual Meeting drew thousands of scientists from around the world to Baltimore, Maryland, where they presented their research and discussed new findings, trends, and challenges within the field of ecology. This paper summarizes the discussion at Special Session 38: A Publishing Roundtable with the ESA Editors-in-Chief (EICs) and Editorial Staff, held on August 13 at the Annual Meeting. This roundtable was an opportunity for ESA editorial staff and EICs to explain common reasons for delayed paper publication times and to provide advice to help authors sail through the peer review and editorial processes as quickly as possible. ESA wants to ensure a speedy, straightforward, and fruitful publishing experience for authors, subject-matter editors, editors-in-chief, and publications staff members alike. Advice fell into three main areas: steps authors can take prior to submission, common sticking points with submitted articles, and demystifying the review process. Here, we present a summary of the roundtable so that this information may reach a wider audience and serve as a useful, accessible reference point for authors and potential authors. Choosing the appropriate journal and article type to match the goals, category, and scale of one's research is the first step authors can take to help ensure a frictionless publication of their work. Detailed summaries of the aims and scope for each of the different journals in ESA's portfolio are available on Wiley Online Library's website at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com; select the appropriate journal, navigate to the “About” menu, and select the “Read Full Aims and Scope” section. We recommend careful consideration when reviewing these publication options and reviewing the specific requirements for your chosen article type prior to beginning the writing process. Keep in mind that editors-in-chief across journals are often in close communication with one another. It is common for a paper whose scope does not align with the journal to which it was originally submitted to be recommended for transfer to a different journal in the ESA portfolio. Carefully choosing the appropriate article type and journal initially can allow authors to find a home for their paper more quickly. On the subject of taking time to review and carefully consider documentation: ESA publishes detailed Author Guidelines for each journal, all of which are available through the Wiley Online Library at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/. These guidelines exist to provide authors with detailed and in-depth guidance as to what makes a paper acceptable by ESA policies and standards. They also include information about the different, unique types of articles offered by each journal. These guidelines are extensive, and we understand that they can appear daunting at a glance. We recommend a deliberate, thorough read prior to submitting a paper—adhering closely to author guidelines will save authors significant amounts of time later in the publication process. After reviewing the Aims and Scope and Author Guidelines, you may still have questions as to your paper's suitability for a particular journal or about a specific aspect of your manuscript. ESA welcomes pre-submission inquiries at email protected. We take these queries seriously and will ensure that they reach the correct editor-in-chief or member of publications staff, as appropriate. The next topics covered were two of the most common sticking points for authors and sources of delays for papers: (a) figures and (b) data availability. Turning first to figures, here are key steps you can take as an author to help prevent your paper from being held up for quality control checks by ESA publications staff (see Fig. 1). First, ensure that your images are of appropriate size and quality. Please refer to the Author Guidelines for specific details—we will note, however, that a figure can fit technical specifications and still be unacceptable for publication if the text is too small and blurry to read. Figures should appear crisp even upon zooming in, and text should be comfortable to read when the figure is sized to fit a PDF page, as it will be upon publication. (It is possible, and advisable, to check this in advance by resizing your figure to PDF dimensions: 18 cm wide × 24 cm tall.) Aside from technical specifications, the single biggest issue causing delays has to do with securing the necessary permissions to publish figures containing reprinted or otherwise restricted material. (Note that figures created wholly by authors, whether photographic or illustrated, do not require additional permissions.) It may be tempting to make your figures more visually appealing by including illustrations of relevant organisms (e.g., a silhouette of a carp). But including illustrative material from a third-party website or program almost always leads to slower paper processing speeds. Authors and ESA publications staff must work together to verify that each individual image is published under a license that allows for commercial reuse, since Wiley is a commercial publisher. This process can quickly grow complex. For example, many online media libraries have very specific requirements for providing credit information. Some popular software programs used for creating figures contain libraries of icons that are not permitted for commercial reuse, which conflicts with the CC-BY license for papers published open access in ESA journals. It is easy to see how tracking down these permissions can become time-consuming for both authors and publications staff, creating delays in publishing your paper. To avoid this complexity, ESA publications staff recommends against the use of third-party illustrations that are not strictly necessary for reporting your research. While that carp silhouette may look nice, it may not be worth the holdup before your paper can be published—and your research speaks for itself. If you do choose to use third-party illustrative material, providing links to each individual image as early in the process as possible will also save a good deal of back-and-forth. On a similar note, publications staff also discourage the use of photos containing identifiable people, or photos taken by individuals who are not authors of the paper. Both these cases require collecting additional permission documentation from the person(s) depicted or from the photographer. As with silhouettes and illustrations, this is a frequent source of delays. ESA upholds the FAIR guiding principles of open data in our publications—data must be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. (More information about FAIR principles is available at https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/.) Reflecting our commitment to open science, ESA has adopted a cross-journal open research policy, which may be found at https://esa.org/publications/data-policy. This document includes specific instructions for multiple different article types as well as detailed examples of appropriate openresearch statements. As with the Author Guidelines, we recommend reading it in full before submitting a manuscript. In practice, this policy means that all data and code used to generate a paper's results must be archived in a trusted repository upon manuscript acceptance. Acceptable repositories, for our purposes, are ones that are publicly accessible and produce a permanent link for each deposit, ensuring that it can be accessed in perpetuity by future researchers. Some popular repositories—GitHub, for example—are unacceptable under our policy because they do not produce a permanent link or clear versioning. All GitHub material must instead be archived in Zenodo. Note that this policy applies regardless of the size of the resulting dataset. Authors dealing with large quantities of raw data have, in the past, successfully archived their material in figshare. Please pay close attention to the instructions of ESA staff related to preparing data deposits for final submission and publication. We make exceptions to our open research policy for sensitive data that cannot be released publicly. However, authors should clearly state the cause for a possible exception as early as possible (at the time of manuscript submission) and provide detailed instructions for how qualified researchers may obtain the relevant data, including an email address for a relevant point of contact. Providing this information up front will result in an easier quality control process. If you have any questions, please review the Author Guidelines for the relevant journal and the open research policy; if questions persist, you may contact ESA publications staff at email protected. At the end of 2025, ESA began working with a group of dedicated data editors who provide specialized feedback to authors on their open research statements. We hope that this additional layer of expert guidance and support helps ensure the timely processing of papers and that our data editors can serve as a useful resource for authors related to all things open research. After exploring some of the ways that authors can help ensure their paper is published quickly, it is worth considering common causes of delay to the publication process that are out of the author's—or ESA's—control. Of these factors, the most pressing by far is the increasing difficulty of securing reviewers for a paper in a timely manner. This emerged as a persistent issue affecting authors at the roundtable and other publishing-related events at the Annual Meeting. When your manuscript is listed as “seeking reviewers” in your author portal, this does not mean that ESA publications staff are sitting idly by; in actuality, a great deal of effort by staff and subject-matter editors is happening behind the scenes. Staff are sending out review invitations in small batches, waiting for responses, and, if those responses are negative (or never appear), restarting the process—which can quickly add up to a timescale of months. ESA values a robust, ethical, and human-centered peer review process, which requires the time and energy of volunteer reviewers to function (time and energy that is increasingly in short supply). Still, we understand that this knowledge does not alleviate the frustration that many authors feel observing their manuscript “held up” in the review process for extended periods. It is worth noting that this reviewer crisis extends beyond the scope of ESA's portfolio of journals and indeed beyond the field of ecology. Across the natural sciences, it takes increasingly more requests to find a suitable number of reviewers for a manuscript compared to outcomes measured 10 or 20 years ago (Publons 2018, Tropini et al. 2023, Meyerson et al. 2025). (The largest number of requests recorded by ESA publications staff is 37 invitations for two reviews.) Still, there are ways that authors can contribute to mitigating this trend, most notably by helping to expand the reviewer pool. The Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) recommends that authors who benefit from the peer review process should consider becoming peer reviewers themselves (COPE Council 2017). A good adage is the “golden rule” of peer reviewing—“review for others as you would have others review for you” (Glen 2014). Your completion of a review contributes to the kind of healthy review ecosystem that will ultimately benefit your papers down the line. Ensure that editors can find you by maintaining a strong web presence. Many subject-matter editors look online to find potential reviewers based on areas of expertise. Make sure that you have an ORCID and a Web of Science profile filled out with accurate keywords relating to your areas of focus and ensure that your profile is accurately reported by ResearchGate and Google Scholar. Additionally, ESA publications staff suggests one other piece of advice that may help decrease the amount of time a paper spends in review. If you receive a request to review a paper but feel you are unable to do so, please decline the invitation promptly. Your quick response, even if it is negative, allows staff to send out more review invitations in a timely manner, keeping the process moving expediently for everyone. The advice in this article is presented to help authors overcome common hurdles, especially those related to figures and data, and sail toward a smooth publication of their research. As a society, ESA is at its core a community-minded organization. This carries with it a commitment to transparency within our community. With that in mind, it is our hope that the section detailing the peer review process from the perspective of publications staff is a useful peek behind the curtain for authors. ESA's Annual Meeting provides an opportunity for authors, editors, and publications staff to communicate face to face, raise concerns, and bring up new topics of discussion that can then be continued in a different forum. Across journals, we process a high volume of papers (receiving ~3,500 a year; publishing ~1,000), meaning that such opportunities to engage directly with the needs of authors are much appreciated. We are hopeful that future annual meetings will bring similar opportunities for connection and the exchange of useful knowledge. I would like to thank ESA's Executive Director and former Director of Publishing, Adrienne Sponberg, for the opportunity to present this article. My sincere thanks as well to the rest of ESA's tireless publications staff for their help in preparing this piece: Sabrina Levey, Ellen Cotter, Heather Carlo, Pete Mooreside, Sarah Schneider, Brad Walker, and Hayley Williams.
Madeline Lee (Mon,) studied this question.