The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) now welcomes submissions to its online peer reviewed publications—the brand new Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management and the revitalized North American Fauna monograph series (last published in 1991). We welcome submissions to both journals from all scientists—Service or otherwise. These journals are in the public domain and completely electronic, from submission to review and online publication. There are no page charges for authors publishing in these journals. Access is unlimited and free of charge for anyone with internet access; paper copies are not distributed by the Service.

The Service continues to support and encourage its scientists to publish in external peer reviewed journals, at their discretion. The new publications are not intended to replace other external journals. Instead, the new journals are intended to facilitate publication and dissemination of results for the important science the Service engages in that did not previously have standardized peer reviewed outlets. The new journals do not publish inferior science. On the contrary, papers published in the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management and North American Fauna are subject to rigorous peer review, and must achieve the same fundamental level of scientific rigor as those published in other peer reviewed journals. Studies must be vigorous, well presented, properly designed, statistically sound, and conclusions must logically follow from the data and analyses presented. However, these publications stand out from the traditional peer reviewed literature in that they do not require manuscripts to appeal to a broad audience, be perceived as being novel, or be expected to necessarily attain a high scientific impact factor.

We recognize that within the confines of the work environment, many agency personnel must focus on fairly narrow topics or specific management problems. The resulting products may be fundamentally sound, but not publishable in traditional peer reviewed outlets because the topics or presentations are not sufficiently broad to appeal to journal audiences. While such papers may have limited application or ability to draw broad scale inference, the data are often critical to conservation efforts and meeting agency management obligations. Further, the publication of these more narrowly focused manuscripts may facilitate subsequent broad scale synthesis across taxa or geographic areas, and thereby allow inference at larger scales.

The current need for data relating to climate conditions and global climate change provides a timely example. As researchers strive to document climate changes and predict future climate outcomes, there is a constant search for historic data upon which to base comparisons. The reality is, such data frequently exist, but have often not been published or widely disseminated. Thus, scientists and managers often face a paucity of data to which results can be compared. The Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management and North American Fauna provide a mechanism for rigorous peer review and wide dissemination of these types of scientific data and analyses.