Ending elitism in peer-review publication

The peer-review publication process can be used to assign credibility, improve dissemination, and as a proxy to compare the relative merits of studies. Researchers, however, remain frustrated by limitations that continue to escape solutions (e.g. Partly because of these challenges, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution was launched as an experimental model for exploring changes to the conventional process. The journal has now completed its first full year, with three high quality papers published in 2009. Submission rate was low (one additional submission was rejected), but we anticipate that the exposure proffered from volume 2, our efforts to promote the journal over the past year, plus recent changes to author fees, will generate a growing submission rate through 2010. Several novel features were incorporated initially (Aarssen 2008) in our enthusiasm to address several issues all at onceprobably too many, as it turns out, and so our experience in this past year has called for some revised perspectives, detailed