It is now almost 6 years since the New Zealand Journal of Zoology, as one of the Royal Society of New Zealand's journals, entered into a partnership with Taylor & Francis. My three terms as Senior Editor are up this December, so the Royal Society of New Zealand will appoint a new Senior Editor from next year. After 28 years as sole Executive Editor, and 6 years as Senior Editor, I will gratefully pass my long responsibility for the New Zealand Journal of Zoology to another hand. I will continue as an Associate Editor and look forward to supporting the new Senior Editor and watching the benefits that a change at the helm will bring to the New Zealand Journal of Zoology’s extended family of authors, referees, subscribers and readers.
I am glad to be able to take this opportunity to offer my profound thanks to everyone connected with the New Zealand Journal of Zoology over those many years, starting with successive CEOs and staff of the Royal Society of New Zealand. I started with a part-time commitment to the Royal Society of New Zealand in early 1983 that I did not expect to last more than 2–3 years, but editorial work has turned into an unexpected, challenging and greatly satisfying career. Ross Moore invited me to take over running the New Zealand Journal of Zoology in 1991 under the old model (in addition to the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand until 2001); Di McCarthy and Sue Wilkins guided us all through the move to Taylor & Francis in 2009, and negotiated my transition to Senior Editor. Throughout all these changes, the sterling support from the Royal Society of New Zealand family (office staff and fellow editors, assistants and reviewers too many to list) has never failed.
Since January 2010, our partnership with Taylor & Francis has developed smoothly. Our authors hugely appreciated the cancellation of page charges and also the ScholarOne online submission program accessible from anywhere. Our excellent Associate Editors, with a broad range of expertise and genuine enthusiasm for their jobs, have significantly reduced the average time to get papers refereed and a first decision sent to authors, clearly illustrating the benefit of spreading the workload across more than one pair of shoulders. ScholarOne helps keep the team together and provides a meticulous track record of the subsequent processing of all manuscripts that pass the necessary initial scrutiny. An occasional delay in production causing a slightly longer gap from acceptance to publication is a minor remaining problem that we are working on. shows how some key figures for the 5 years under the old system compare with the 5 years since.
Table 1 Submissions data for New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 2005–2014.
Taylor & Francis is party to international sales agreements that ensure that the New Zealand Journal of Zoology is viewable in thousands of institutions and libraries worldwide. This global outreach hugely increases the round-the-world accessibility of papers written about or relevant to New Zealand zoology, a matter of perpetual concern for New Zealand authors working in a small country on the edge of the planet. Across the vast range of territory included in our stated geographical scope (the Pacific basin, west to east from Australia to Chile and China to Canada/USA, and south to north from Antarctica to Japan and Alaska) there is a huge diversity of animal life and questions of wide zoological interest. We welcome papers describing them and so will our international readership already represented in all those countries. Our readership has increased markedly since the journals became available electronically through our contract with Taylor & Francis. International readership in particular has jumped as a result, representing a substantial increase in global dissemination of New Zealand research.
Impact factors (IF) are calculated annually and tend to favour papers published in fast-moving fields. By contrast, our papers are often long-lived and widely read for many years. The list of the top 10 articles downloaded in 2014 includes six published in or before 2003. Taylor & Francis is expert at using all possible forms of electronic marketing, now including mobile communication networks such as Facebook. Over the 5 years since we partnered with it, our IF has been consistently higher than before, a great compliment to the expertise and unflagging energy of Taylor & Francis’ staff.
Targeted marketing campaigns are among Taylor & Francis' specialities. To celebrate World Animal Day in 2014, it promoted a collection of articles on endangered species selected from its zoology journals. Three papers from the New Zealand Journal of Zoology scored 73, 56 and 19 downloads during this campaign. Likewise, to celebrate the 2014 World Migratory Bird Day, Taylor & Francis offered free online access to a collection of articles from its zoology journals on migratory birds, after which the New Zealand Journal of Zoology received 343 download requests—the top three got 132, 107 and 99 requests.
We will continue to serve our authors and readers with a broad-based journal widely read overseas and with the kind of rapid, easy, online manuscript processing that characterises a publication venue of choice for an increasing number of authors. By adapting from paper copy typeset by hand (the system on which I learned the job) through all the transitional stages to the swift electronic author-upload technology used today, the history of the New Zealand Journal of Zoology could be seen as a cultural form of Darwin's ‘descent with modification’. All power to those who shepherd it into 2016 and beyond.