Submission, Review and Publication Process

Submission

The Service has contracted with AllenTrack to manage the submission and review process for Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management, North American Fauna and the Manuscript Administrative Review System. Authors may submit manuscripts and associated correspondence at each outlet’s online manuscript submission and peer review sites; web-links will be provided soon.

On your first visit to an outlet site, you will need to register for an account; the same login name and password can be used on all of the Service outlet sites; there is no need to register again for each one. Similarly, you will have the same homepage and login for each outlet, even if you have multiple roles (e.g., author and reviewer). You will be able to submit all text, tables, and figures online. More detailed instructions will be available on each site.

Key words will be designated by each author for their submission. Similarly, Subject Editors and reviewers will self-designate their own areas of expertise, using the same list of key words. Based on the correlation of these designations, each submission will be assigned to appropriate Subject Editors and reviewers.

There are no charges for manuscripts submitted to the Service’s publication system.

Peer Review

The designated Subject Editor will coordinate the peer review of each submission. Manuscripts will be critically reviewed by at least two* experts in the relevant discipline. However, we may return to authors without review any manuscript that Editors judge to be of low technical or rhetorical quality or simply inappropriate for the outlet to which it was submitted. Authors are responsible for the statistical validity of their work; experimental design and the analysis of the results should receive critical review by a statistician before submission. Reviewers and authors have the option of anonymity*. Authors who wish to exercise this option should structure their manuscripts accordingly. Because the review process depends on volunteers, it sometimes can be lengthy; however, we strive to get evaluations of well-written papers back to authors within 45 days after submission. Papers will be published online in a preliminary rough format within a week of final acceptance. These pre-publications will be citable and have Digital Object Identifier (DOI) tags allowing them to be linked to the final polished product that will be published online several weeks later.

Authors should do their part by revising papers promptly, ideally within 1 month after the paper is evaluated by the Editor-In-Chief. Papers that have been out for revision for 3 months or more will be considered withdrawn, and revisions completed after that time will be considered new submissions. Reviewers (and editors) react positively to concisely written and well-organized papers and are likely to give such papers priority attention. Careless preparation of manuscripts implies careless research and thought and may lead to negative critiques. Authors can greatly help their own cause if they (1) write direct, unambiguous, grammatically correct prose and avoid redundancy and wordiness; (2) clearly establish the intellectual context and practical or theoretical importance of their work; (3) provide all methodological information needed to understand and interpret their results, without unnecessary details; (4) prevent statistical or analytical November 12, 2008ntegrate their results broadly but relevantly with the published literature; (6) forgo trivia and unwarranted speculation; and (7) follow the outlet’s style and format. Authors for whom English is not their primary language are strongly encouraged to seek help from someone for whom it is when they prepare their papers for submission to the outlet.

*This is not necessarily the case for submissions to the Manuscript Administrative Review System where the specifics of the review process (e.g., number of reviewers, anonymity of reviewers and their comments) will vary for each document. The author(s) will correspond with the Editor-in-Chief or the Subject Editor to determine the specific review parameters needed for the type of document being reviewed. More details will be provided on the Manuscript Administrative Review System website when launched.

Republication

We will consider submissions for Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management and North American Fauna from previously published works when they are not already part of the formal literature, copyrighted, or readily available, and publication in these outlets would therefore significantly serve scientific interests. Author(s) with any doubt about the appropriateness of re-publication for a specific manuscript should contact the Editor-in-Chief, before submission. Submissions that will be considered for re-publication include: agency publications, theses or dissertations, technical analyses of findings published previously for lay audiences, reports required by sponsors and not widely distributed, papers that are not abstracted by Biological Abstracts or a similar reference, and other works that do not result in accession by libraries. However, if any portion of the manuscript has been published or reported elsewhere, the authors must explain all similarities between information in the manuscript and the other publication(s), and properly cite the original publication as to avoid dual publication. We subscribe to the standards articulated by Kendall in Dual Publication of Scientific Information, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 110:573-574 (1981). We discourage fragmented reporting of scientific results whenever possible. If publishing a single comprehensive paper is not feasible, we recommend related papers be coordinated, cross-referenced, and submitted together. However, if necessary, annual and interim reports may be submitted as Notes in the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management.

Last updated: November 12, 2008