How international journals can support ecology from the Global South

Abstract

Two years ago, we published an editorial demonstrating that submitted and published papers in Journal of Applied Ecology were heavily skewed towards English-speaking authors from the Global North, with nearly 80% of our submitted papers and more than 88% of our published papers coming from North America, Europe and Oceania. This contribution provoked a strong response on social media, and was followed by a number of studies further demonstrating that research outputs published in leading ecological and conservation journals remain primarily written by authors with affiliations in the Global North (Eichhorn et al., 2020; Hazlett et al., 2020; Melles et al., 2019). These biases are not new, but events this year have triggered further conversations within the scientific community about representation, representativeness and decolonisation as a much-needed process to improve diversity in disciplines such as applied ecology and conservation (see e.g. Antonelli, 2020; Telegraph, 2020). These discussions, as well as the informal interactions that followed the publication of our 2019 editorial, resonated with us and have motivated us to identify steps we could take as Senior Editors to address the uneven global distribution in Journal of Applied Ecology's authorship, readership and editorial processes.