Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE) and the 4 other BES journals recently announced a partnership with Wiley‘s open access journal, Ecology and Evolution. We now offer the authors of good quality research that we are unable to publish, the option to transfer their article to Ecology and Evolution.

If the authors of a rejected article are offered this option, and if they choose to go ahead with it, their full article plus the accompanying peer reviewer reports will be transferred to the Editors of Ecology and Evolution for consideration. The authors will not need to reformat their article, and a publication decision will be made as soon as possible after the transfer. A transfer may also be offered before peer review at MEE, in which case the article would need to be peer reviewed as normal at Ecology and Evolution.

Many high quality journals have high rejection rates, and so articles can end up being peer reviewed repeatedly by different journals. The main objective of this rapid manuscript transferral system is to lessen the burden on our community of peer reviewers, and to make sure that good quality research has the opportunity to be published quickly, without further unnecessary review.

Ecology and Evolution and MEE both use a blind peer review process, and so reviewers will remain anonymous throughout the transfer. In addition, any confidential comments to the MEE Editors will not be transferred, and our reviewers names and contact details will not be added to the Ecology and Evolution reviewer database. However, if any of our reviewers have an objection to this transfer system, they are welcome to contact our editorial office and opt out.

Ecology and Evolution publishes research covering all areas of ecology, evolution, and conservation science. It was launched in September 2011, has already been accepted for indexing by ISI, and should hopefully receive its first Impact Factor in 2013. It currently receives transferred manuscripts from a total of 16 journals published by Wiley, and of course accepts direct submissions as well. It is an open access journal, and so publication fees do apply, although authors of transferred manuscripts are offered a 20% discount on this fee, and authors of direct submissions that are BES members are offered a 10% discount.