What is PCI Zoology ?
- PCI Zoology is stimulating: it recommends remarkable articles.
- PCI Zoology is free: there are no fees associated with the evaluation process, and no charge for access to the comments and recommendations. The website is freely accessible.
- PCI Zoology is transparent: Reviews and recommendations (for unpublished articles) and recommendations (for published articles) are freely available for consultation. Recommendations are signed by the recommenders. Reviews may also be signed if the reviewers agree to do so.
- PCI Zoology is not exclusive: An article may be recommended by different Peer Communities in X (a feature of particular interest for articles relating to multidisciplinary studies) and may even be published in a traditional journal (although this is not the goal of PCI Zoology).
Managing board of PCI Zoology
Dominique Adriaens (Univ Ghent, Belgium)
Ellen Decaestecker (KULeuven, Belgium)
Benoït Facon (Inrae, France)
Isabelle Schon (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium)
Bertanne Visser (UCLouvain, Belgium)
To contact the Managing Board please send a message to contact@zool.peercommunityin.org
Which manuscripts can be recommended?
For work on domestic animal species and animals managed by humans, please consider PCI Animal Science.
Editorial Criteria
- Requires data, computer codes and mathematical and statistical analysis scripts to be made available to reviewers and recommenders at the time of submission and to readers after recommendation.
- Welcomes reproductions of studies.
- Welcomes preregistration submissions and preprint submissions based on preregistrations (whether or not reviewed)
- Welcomes preprints reporting negative results, provided that the questions addressed and the methodology are sound.
- Does not accept submissions of preprints presenting financial conflicts of interest. Other conflicts of interest must be minimal and declared.
- Ensures that, as far as possible, the reviewers and referees have no conflict of interest with the content or authors of the study being evaluated.
Peer Community In promotes the repeatability of science
Mandatory rules:
Articles recommended by PCI must provide the readers:
-Raw data by making them available either in the text or through an open data repository such as Zenodo, Dryad or some other institutional repositories (see Directory of Open Access Repositories). Data must be reusable, thus metadata and accompanying text must carefully describe the data.
-Details on the quantitative analyses (e.g., data treatment and statistical scripts in R, bioinformatic pipeline scripts, etc.) and details concerning simulations (scripts, codes) in the text, as appendices, or through an open data repository, such as Zenodo, Dryad or some other institutional repositories (see Directory of Open Access Repositories). The scripts or codes must be carefully described such that another researcher can run them.
-Details on experimental procedures. These details must be given in the text or as appendices at the end of the article.
-PCI encourages authors to use preregistrations: Authors may post their research questions and analysis plan to an independent registry before observing the research outcomes, and thus before writing and submitting their article. This provides a way for them to clarify their hypotheses, avoid confusing “postdictions” and predictions, and carefully plan appropriate statistical treatment of the data (eg see 10.1073/pnas.1708274114).
-PCI also welcomes submissions of preregistrations. Authors can submit their preregistrations to a PCI before beginning their study, and thus before acquiring the data. Preregistrations are then evaluated by recommenders based on independent reviews, in exactly the same way as preprint articles. Preregistrations can thus be rejected or undergo revisions, improving the quality and robustness of the experimental design. When a preregistration is accepted, the subsequent article submitted to the corresponding PCI would be recommended provided the study has been conducted as described in the preregistration (or with any modifications clearly justified). In this way, an article cannot be rejected due to the outcome of the study only. Details on preregistration submissions can be found for example here.
PCI Zoology friendly journals
The Editors-in-Chief of the following journals have indicated (or have been asked by their scientific Society) they will consider submissions of articles recommended by a PCI and that they may use PCI reviews and recommendations for their own review processes, if appropriate:
PLoS Biology
PeerJ
eLife
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
Evolution
Trends in Plant Science
Global Ecology and Biogeography
Ecology Letters
Evolution Letters
OIKOS
BMC Evolutionary Biology
Molecular Ecology
Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Nordic Journal of Botany
Journal of Avian Biology
Evolutionary Applications
Frontiers of Biogeography
Journal of Biogeography
Evolutionary Ecology
Ecography
Genetica
Rethinking Ecology
Molecular Ecology Resources
Attention! The following journals are NOT PCI friendly (they would not accept preprints recommended by PCI as submissions):
American Naturalist
Behavioral Ecology
Cladistics