Publishing Policies and Procedures


INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
PEER REVIEW
Peer Review Process
Single-Anonymous and Double-Anonymous Review
Review Confidentiality and Co-Review
DECISIONS ON MANUSCRIPTS
Rejection Policy
Appeals of Rejections
Withdrawn Articles
PRODUCTION PROCESS
PUBLICATION
Online-Only Journals
Online and Print Journals
Embargoes
OPEN ACCESS
Open Access Journals
Hybrid Journals
Third-Party Content in Open Access Journals
POST-PUBLICATION
Article Sharing
Institutional Repositories
Sharing with Colleagues
Corrigenda and Errata
Retractions and Expressions of Concern
Name Changes
PUBLICATION FEES
Open Access Journals
Subscription Journals
Low-Income Countries
Color Charges
Waivers
PRE-PRINT SERVERS
THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE
AUTHOR GUIDELINES AND CONTRIBUTION STATEMENTS
Artificial Intelligence
Changes to Author List
ETHICS AND MISCONDUCT POLICIES
Complaints Against Editors and Reviewers
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Information about manuscript review and full instructions for authors for ESA's publications can be found using the following links:

PEER REVIEW

Peer Review Process

The following steps constitute the ESA journals’ review process:

1. Submitted papers go through a basic quality control (QC) process to ensure the manuscript conforms to ESA’s formatting guidelines and that no files or information are missing or are unclear. This QC process includes running the paper through plagiarism detection software. 

2. If the paper passes initial QC, it is sent to the Editor-in-Chief (EIC). The EIC broadly reviews the content and scope of the paper and decides whether it will be assigned to a subject editor to be sent out for review. The EIC also reviews the results of the plagiarism report. The EIC reserves the right to withdraw or reject papers before review if the content does not meet the scope or standard of the journal in terms of English quality, science quality, etc. Papers with a high level of text similarity from previously published works will be withdrawn or rejected, unless this similarity falls into specific allowable categories (the paper was previously posted as a preprint, the paper is part of a master’s or doctoral thesis, the abstract was previously presented at a conference, etc.). 

3. The paper is assigned to a subject editor. The subject editor again assesses the paper for its appropriateness for review. 

4. If the paper is deemed appropriate for review, it is sent out to potential reviewers. 

5. When two reviews have been submitted, the subject editor analyzes the reviews and makes a decision on the paper. Occasionally, a decision is made based on more than two reviews, or a single review including a review from the subject editor. 

6. When a revised version is submitted, it goes through an initial QC process to ensure all the files are in order. 

7. After QC, the paper gets sent back to the original subject editor. The editor sometimes makes a decision on the paper immediately, but he or she might also send it back to the reviewers if he or she wants a second or third opinion. 

8. When the subject editor judges a paper ready for publication, the editor accepts the paper and notifies the author of acceptance. 

Single-Anonymous and Double-Anonymous Peer Review

Most ESA journals use single-anonymous review. This means the editors and reviewers are able to see names of authors, but authors are not able to see names of reviewers (they can, however, see the name of the subject editor). The Journal of Insect Science uses a double anonymous review format where the reviewers cannot view the authors' names and the authors cannot see the reviewers' names.

Review Confidentiality and Co-Review

Manuscripts in review should be kept confidential. An invited reviewer can co-review a manuscript with someone else (such as a lab member, post-doc, or student) if they tell the subject editor when they agree to review. Reviewers must share the name and email address of any co-reviewers in the designated space on the review form when submitting the review. 

DECISIONS ON MANUSCRIPTS

Rejection Policy

Papers rejected from one ESA journal cannot be re-submitted to the same journal or another ESA journal. Editors might consider a resubmission if enough has changed that the manuscript could be considered a new paper, such as if extra years of field trials or new experiments were added. 

Appeals of Rejections

An author can appeal an editor's decision to reject a manuscript for publication through the ESA Publications Council. To appeal a rejection, the author must send the following items as email attachments to the ESA Director of Publications at pubs@entsoc.org:

• A letter that explains why the author has chosen to appeal the rejection. The letter should address specific reasons provided by the editor for the rejection.

• The editor’s letter of rejection. 

• The reviewers’ comments.

• The rejected version of the manuscript.

• Any additional correspondence.

The Director of Publications forwards these materials to the Publications Council's appeals subcommittee for review. The appeals subcommittee reviews and discusses the materials provided. In writing, the subcommittee then informs the author, editor, and the Director of Publications of their decision. The decision of the Publications Council is final. The appeals process takes approximately 1 month from when the appeals subcommittee receives the appeal materials.

Withdrawn Articles

Withdrawn articles can be re-submitted to the journal that originally withdrew the paper or be submitted to another ESA journal. Authors should address the reason for withdrawal before re-submitting. Papers that are withdrawn and resubmitted to the same or another ESA journal without addressing the reason for withdrawal are likely to be rejected. 

PRODUCTION PROCESS

After acceptance, articles are typeset and copyedited by Newgen in partnership with Oxford University Press. Authors will be asked to sign a license to publish. This license is needed before a paper can be published. During typesetting and copyediting, papers will be checked for journal style, formatting, and basic errors such as typos. The copyeditors will not make substantive changes to the content or language of a paper. After a paper has been copyedited and typeset, it will be sent to the corresponding author for final review. After the proofs have been returned, revised proofs will not be sent back to the author unless the author requests it. 

PUBLICATION

Online-Only Journals

For ESA’s online-only journals, articles are published online into an issue as soon as they finish the production process. 

Online and Print Journals

For ESA’s journals that publish both online and in print, articles are published online into an Advanced Access queue as soon as they finish the production process. Articles are then placed into the next available issue in order of acceptance date and depending on space in the issue. When an issue publishes, the articles in the issue will be moved out of the Advanced Access queue and will be given a volume number, issue number, and page rage. All articles have DOIs as soon as they are published into Advance Access, and those DOIs do not change when the article is placed in an issue, so papers may be cited using those DOIs as soon as the paper is published online. 

Embargoes

ESA staff often embargo articles for special promotion, such as a blog post or press release. Articles can also be embargoed if they have been registered in Zoobank, are part of a special collection, or need to publish alongside another article. An article being embargoed can sometimes mean a publication delay of  a week or more, although ESA staff try to minimize the time as much as possible. If an author requires an embargo for funding or institutional reasons, please contact the ESA editorial office. 

OPEN ACCESS

Open Access Journals

ESA publishes three fully open access journals: Arthropod Management Tests, the Journal of Insect Science, and the Journal of Integrated Pest Management. 

Hybrid Journals

Authors wishing to publish open access in one of the hybrid journals (American Entomologist, Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Environmental Entomology, Insect Systematics and Diversity, Journal of Economic Entomology, Journal of Medical Entomology) may choose to do so for a fee. 

Third-Party Content in Open Access Papers

If you will be publishing your paper under an open access license but it contains material for which you do not have open access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material: 

Title of Content

Author, original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder]

This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons license of this publication. For permission to re-use, please contact the rights holder. 

POST-PUBLICATION

Article Sharing

ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Other Social Sites

Authors who publish under an open access license are able to post the published version of their paper online, including on social article sharing sites. Authors who publish under a subscription license, however, are not permitted to post their accepted or typeset article on commercial sites. Authors who wish to do so can post their original, pre-peer-review article on a commercial site such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. For more information, please see the guidelines from Oxford University press here. 

Institutional Repositories

Please refer to the guidelines from Oxford University Press, found here. 

Sharing with Colleagues

Authors are free to share the final, published version of a paper directly with interested colleagues. Oxford also provides a toll-free link to all authors that authors can share with colleagues, which allows the colleague free, direct access to the author’s published paper online. 

Corrigenda and Errata

After an article has published, significant errors can be corrected through a corrigendum or erratum. Corrigenda are used to correct errors introduced by the authors, while errata are used to correct errors introduced by the typesetters or the editorial office. Minor or typographical errors that do not affect the scientific interpretation of a paper typically will not be corrected.

Retractions and Expressions of Concern

Papers can be retracted for multiple reasons, such as errors in data that change the scientific understanding of the paper or ethical violations. In some cases, such as when there is evidence of unreliability but the investigation is not definitive, an expression of concern might be issued. ESA journals follow the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines for retractions and expressions of concern. 

Name Changes

ESA permits authors to change their names on prior publications. Details of Oxford University Press's policy, including a link to initiate such changes, can be found here.

PUBLICATION FEES

Click here for an overview of ESA's publication fees.

Open Access Journals

ESA’s open access journals charge an open access fee. ESA members receive a discount on all open access fees. ESA members are also eligible to request a one-time waiver if they do not have monetary support for publication fees. 

Subscription Journals

ESA’s subscription journals have page charges. ESA members receive discounted page charges. ESA members are also eligible to request a one-time waiver if they do not have monetary support for publication fees.

Authors also are able to pay for open access in a subscription journal if they choose. ESA members receive a discount on the open access charge. Open access charge waivers are not available when publishing open access in the subscription journals. 

Low-Income Countries

Authors from a select list of low-income countries are eligible to publish for free or receive reduced open access fees and page charges. The discounts available are included on each journal’s website. 

Color Charges

ESA’s online-only journals do not charge fees for color figures. ESA’s print journals, however, do charge fees if authors wish to have their figures printed in color.  

Authors may elect to publish figures online in color and in print in greyscale at no charge. 

Waivers

ESA members with no institutional support may request a page charge fee waiver. E-mail us at pubs@entsoc.org to request a waiver.

Waivers are limited and are available on a "first-come, first-served" basis once a manuscript is finally accepted. If waivers are unavailable, the publication of a manuscript may be delayed until funds become available. Waivers are not available to nonmembers. Waivers are limited to one per year per author.

PRE-PRINT SERVERS

ESA journals accept submissions that have been submitted previously to a pre-print server. However, pre-print servers where papers are formally reviewed and a decision is issued will be considered previous publication and will not be accepted for review. Please note in the cover letter that the paper has been submitted to a pre-print server. 

THESES AND DISSERTATIONS

ESA journals accept submissions that are part of a dissertation of thesis, provided the content was not commercially published. ESA journal authors reserve the rights to re-use portions or the entirety of their article published in an ESA journal in a thesis or dissertation, provided the thesis or dissertation is not commercially published. See "Rights retained by all Oxford journal authors."

DATA ACCESSIBILITY

ESA journals strongly encourage authors to deposit data supporting the results in the paper in an appropriate public archive. Individual journals may have more stringent requirements. ESA is actively moving toward FAIR standards by 2027. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data. ESA journals will provide support to link the paper and data. Any costs associated with archiving the data are the responsibility of the author. ESA journals are integrated with Dryad Data Repository, but authors are free to use whichever repository they prefer. 

When reporting statistical significance, P-values should be reported. However, ESA journals do not require P-values to meet a certain threshold for results to be reported or for a paper to be considered publishable.

AUTHORSHIP GUIDELINES AND CONTRIBUTION STATEMENTS

The list of authors should accurately reflect who carried out the research, who wrote the article, and others who made substantive contributions to the work. For further clarity, authors in ESA publications must meet the below criteria, which are taken from McNutt et al. (2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

  • Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it;
  • AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author’s contribution to the study);
  • AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.

ESA recognizes the global nature of entomology and encourages collaboration with colleagues in the geographic area where the research was conducted. If someone meets the above criteria, they should be listed as an author. Exclusion of authorship is not permitted, nor is guest or honorary authorship. Individuals not meeting the above criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgments section along with a description of their contribution.

All authors will receive an email notifying them of their inclusion in the paper when a manuscript is submitted.

Author Contributions and Contribution Statements
To provide a clearer understanding of how each author contributed to the development of a paper, authors will be asked to define each author’s contribution using the CRediT Taxonomy. An additional, free-form text box will also be provided to expand on these terms when necessary. These CRediT author contribution statements will be published with the paper. It is the responsibility of the authors, not the journal, to provide accurate information about the contribution of each author of the paper. 

Artificial Intelligence
Natural language processing tools driven by AI, such as ChatGPT, do not qualify as authors, and ESA will screen for them in author lists. Authors are required to add a statement within the Acknowledgments section if AI was used in the writing or translation process. In addition, if AI was used in the research process, authors should describe how it was used within the paper's Materials & Methods section. Examples of activities that must be disclosed in the Acknowledgments or Materials & Methods section when AI is used include: generating content or images, writing code, processing data, or translation. Note that, in the case of Arthropod Management Tests, there is no Acknowledgments section and a footnote should be used. An example of an Acknowledgment statement is as follows, “We acknowledge the use of ChatGPT-4 in organizing and articulating ideas during the preparation of this manuscript. While the intellectual contributions and conceptual developments are entirely those of the authors, ChatGPT’s role in streamlining the writing process is duly recognized.” Additional requirements for reporting AI use can be found in each journal's author guidelines.

Role of the Corresponding Author
The corresponding author is the primary contact responsible for returning author proofs and managing any invoices related to the paper in question. Following McNutt et al. (2018, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science), the corresponding author should also:

  • Ensure that all listed authors have approved the manuscript prior to submission and that all authors are made aware of the reviews and substantive correspondence with editors;
  • Verify that all data, materials (including reagents), and code, even those developed or provided by other authors, comply with the transparency and reproducibility standards;
  • Ensure that original data/materials/code upon which the submission is based are preserved and retrievable;
  • Confirm that data/materials/code presented in the paper accurately reflect the originals;
  • Ensure that all authors are aware of and in compliance with best practices.

If an author group wishes to designate that two authors contributed equally to a paper, this can be done through the use of a symbol in the author list and a footnote indicating that the authors contributed equally to the work. The use of two corresponding authors is permitted. 

For multi-author groups, we recommend using the group or consortium name as the author and then including a footnote or table in the article that lists each individual member. Individual members of an author group must meet the same standards outlined in these guidelines.

CHANGES TO THE AUTHOR LIST

Once a paper is submitted to ESA, no changes may be made to the author list without written permission of all authors. This includes the addition of an author or authors, the removal of an author or authors, and any changes to the order of the authors listed. Disputes over the author list, either before or after publication, should be addressed by the relevant institutional authorities and are not the responsibility of the journal.

PUBLICATION ETHICS AND MISCONDUCT POLICIES

The Entomological Society of America (ESA) expects authors, reviewers, editors, and others involved in its publications enterprise to safeguard the integrity of its publications process and to operate according to a high ethical standard. This document defines the expectations of this ethical standard and the procedures for reporting possible misconduct.

Author, Reviewer, and Editor Ethics and Misconduct Policies

The complete ESA Publication Ethics and Misconduct Policies, including how to report a violation and the specific policies for authors, reviewers, and editors, can be found here.

Complaints Against Editors and Reviewers

If an author believes an editor or reviewer has acted unfairly, with bias, abusively, or in some other manner that violates the code of conduct or does not meet ESA’s standard of professionalism, please send your complaint to pubs@entsoc.org. Please include a letter outlining the complaint and all correspondence involving the issue. The information will be shared with the journal’s editorial board and chair of the Publications Council for investigation. 

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

Potential conflicts of interest include any relationships of a financial or personal nature between an author or coauthor and individuals or organizations within three years of submission which, in theory, could affect or bias an author’s scientific judgment, or limit an author’s freedom to publish, analyze, discuss, or interpret relevant data. Sources of financial support originating outside the coauthors’ home institution(s) for any aspect of a study must be indicated in the Acknowledgments section of the paper. Financial support includes not only funding, but gratis provision of materials, services, or equipment. Any additional potential conflicts of interest, not covered in the acknowledgments of financial support, must be revealed to the editor at submission, and disclosed in a statement immediately following the Acknowledgments. If an author or coauthor has entered into an agreement with any entity outside that authors’ home institution, including the home institution of another coauthor, giving that entity veto power over publication of the study or over presentation, analysis, discussion, or interpretation of any results of the study, whether or not such veto power was exercised, this information must be disclosed in a statement immediately following the Acknowledgments. As a suggestion, such a statement could take the following form: “This manuscript is published with the concurrence of [Institution / Company / Individual / etc. X].” If no potential conflicts of interest exist, this must be stated in the cover letter to the editor at submission.

 

 

 

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