MEPS Editors-in-Chief: 29th Annual Report
The Editors-in-Chief of MEPS, O. Kinne and M. Seaman, have prepared their Annual Report to the members of the editorial board. A summary is provided below.
MEPS' leading position confirmed. According to Eigenfactor.org, a non-commercial project that ranks scientific journals by their influence, MEPS occupies the No. 1 position by Eigenfactor in the categories 'Marine & Freshwater Biology' and 'Oceanography'.
MEPS continues to grow. The strong rise in the number of submissions to MEPS (1200 manuscripts per year) led to a temporary backlog of accepted manuscripts, and the time from acceptance to publication rose to 7 months; at present it stands at 5 months, and should decrease to 3 months by the end of 2008. To meet the increase in manuscripts, we are hiring more staff; annual production has increased to 25 volumes and MEPS is being published ahead of schedule; submissions that do not fall within the marine ecological scope of MEPS may be redirected to its new companion, Aquatic Biology.
Website enhancements. An archive of all MEPS articles beginning from Volume 1 (1979) is now freely available for download. Digital object identifier (doi) numbers for all articles are in-cluded in the CrossRef database and enable cross-linking from and to other online articles. A pre-press abstract of each article can be accessed via the MEPS Forthcoming page or via the article's doi. Each abstract page contains a citation export function and a Google Scholar link.
Centralized ms review procedure. A centralized ms review procedure was introduced in 2007. All mss are now submitted to the Inter-Research office and, where appropriate, redistributed by the Editors-in-Chief to Contributing Editors (CEs). This is accomplished with the help of a new online ms tracking system, XPressTrack (XPT), designed to liberate CEs as far as possible from the clerical tasks associated with the ms review process.
Editorial Board. The number of MEPS Contributing Editors has been increased from 28 to 44, and the number of Review Editors has risen from 68 to 89 over the past 2 years. We are deeply saddened by the untimely deaths of John Gray, Alan Southward and Ken Tenore, who all served on the MEPS editorial board for more than 25 years. We greatly appreciate the efforts of all Editors, past and present, on behalf of MEPS.