Discover Ecology Launches as Open-Access Home for Global Ecological Science

A new open-access journal dedicated to the full breadth of ecological science has officially launched, with Springer Nature publishing the inaugural editorial of Discover Ecology on 12 March 2025 as Volume 1, article number 1 of the fledgling publication. The editorial, written by Kevin Cianfaglione of ICL, Junia, Université Catholique de Lille in France, and Rachel Hu of Research Publishing at Springer Nature in Nanjing, China, lays out the mission, scope, and editorial architecture of a journal that its founders hope will become a central resource for researchers, policy makers, and the general public alike. As the first article in the journal’s history, the editorial functions simultaneously as a manifesto and an invitation, signaling the ambitions of a publication that arrives at a moment when ecological knowledge has never been more urgently needed.

The stated mission of Discover Ecology is threefold: to advance the understanding of ecological systems, to foster interdisciplinary research, and to promote solutions that address the complex challenges facing ecosystems and biodiversity in a rapidly changing world. That framing places the journal squarely within the contemporary movement in ecology that treats the discipline not as a purely descriptive science of organisms and their environments, but as a problem-solving enterprise with direct consequences for climate policy, conservation planning, and sustainable development. The editors emphasize that the journal is dedicated to offering valuable insights into the latest advancements in the field, positioning it as a venue where new findings can be disseminated rapidly and without paywalls.

Technically, Discover Ecology operates as a fully open-access, peer-reviewed journal, meaning that every accepted article is made instantly available globally to everyone, free to read and highly discoverable. This publishing model reflects a broader shift in scientific communication, in which the speed and breadth of access are treated as integral to scientific impact rather than incidental to it. For a field like ecology, where findings about species distributions, ecosystem degradation, and climate impacts often carry immediate relevance for land managers, fisheries authorities, and conservation agencies, the removal of subscription barriers is more than a matter of convenience. It is a deliberate design choice intended to ensure that ecological evidence reaches the practitioners and decision makers who need it, including those in institutions and regions that cannot afford subscription-based access.

The journal’s scope is deliberately broad, spanning all fields relevant to ecology, including biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, and ethnology. The inaugural editorial lists an extensive set of topics of interest grouped by section area, and the range is striking. It encompasses behavioural ecology, population ecology, macroecology, biodiversity, the biosphere, plant ecology, animal ecology, ecological theory, the ecological pyramid, ecological conservation, evolutionary ecology, ecophagy, forest ecology, sustainable ecology, desert ecology, animal migration, ecological death, marine ecosystems, aquatic ecology, terrestrial ecology, chemical ecology, and restoration ecology. This cross-cutting structure is designed to emphasize connections between sub-disciplines that have traditionally published in separate venues, encouraging work that bridges, for example, chemical ecology with restoration practice, or macroecological modeling with on-the-ground conservation.

Beyond conventional research papers, the editors make clear that they welcome papers developing new ideas, novelties on species, habitats, ecosystems, methodologies and tools, and work on the evolution of concepts, principles, and the philosophy of ecology. That last category is notable. Few ecology journals explicitly invite scholarship on the conceptual and philosophical foundations of the discipline, and its inclusion suggests that Discover Ecology intends to serve as a forum not only for data-driven studies but also for reflexive examination of how ecologists define their objects of study, from the boundaries of an ecosystem to the ethical dimensions of ecological death and ecophagy, terms that appear in the journal’s topic list and that signal a willingness to engage with less conventional corners of the field.

The journal also aligns itself explicitly with global policy frameworks. The editorial states that Discover Ecology particularly welcomes work that aims to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially Climate Action, Life Below Water, and Life on Land. These three goals map directly onto the core concerns of modern ecology: the climate crisis and its cascading effects on species and ecosystems, the degradation of marine environments, and the accelerating loss of terrestrial biodiversity. By anchoring its priorities to the SDGs, the journal signals to prospective authors that policy-relevant ecological science, including studies that quantify ecosystem change, evaluate restoration interventions, or model future scenarios under warming and land-use change, will be actively sought rather than merely tolerated.

On the governance side, Discover Ecology is in the process of recruiting its Editorial Board Members. The board currently comprises several early career researchers alongside a number of senior experts drawn from various relevant ecological sub-disciplines and sub-domains. The editorial describes a structure in which Section Editors and Editorial Board Members are tasked with executing the journal’s vision and transforming its goals into thoughtful, relevant, and impactful peer-reviewed published works. Their responsibilities include suggesting Topical Collections, review articles, invited articles, and editorials, as well as working with subject expert reviewers to ensure a transparent peer-review system. The inclusion of early career researchers in the board’s composition is a deliberate choice that reflects a growing recognition within scientific publishing that the next generation of ecologists should have a direct hand in shaping the venues where their field’s future work will appear.

The editorial also sets out practical expectations for authors. Manuscripts submitted for review must meet specific requirements of length and novelty in data production, modeling, and analyses, and authors are required to provide their institutional affiliation and official email addresses. These requirements are intended to safeguard the integrity of the peer-review process and to ensure that published work meets standards of novelty rather than merely incremental reporting. In terms of article formats, the journal welcomes submissions of original research, brief communications, comprehensive reviews, perspectives, case studies, and data notes covering any aspect of ecological science, with further detail on length and format available in the submission guidelines on the journal website. The journal also publishes guest-edited Topical Collections of relevance to all aspects of ecology and conservation, a format that allows specialists to assemble clusters of papers around emerging themes.

The invitation to contribute forms the emotional core of the editorial. The editors write that they warmly invite researchers to submit their original research, reviews, perspectives, brief communications, and other accepted article types, arguing that by sharing knowledge, discoveries, and innovations, contributors will play a vital role in advancing ecological science and fostering a global dialogue on sustainability. The closing sentiment, that together the community can shape the future of ecological research and pave the way toward a more sustainable and resilient world, frames the new journal as a collective project rather than a commercial product. For early career scientists in particular, a fully open-access venue with a broad scope and an explicitly interdisciplinary mandate can lower the barriers to publishing work that does not fit neatly into the traditional sub-disciplinary silos of ecology.

The launch of Discover Ecology comes amid intense competition among publishers to establish authoritative open-access outlets in the environmental sciences, and its success will ultimately depend on the quality and visibility of the research it attracts. But the design choices documented in this inaugural editorial, from the fully open-access model and the broad, cross-cutting topic structure to the explicit alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals and the mixed seniority of its editorial board, sketch a coherent vision for what the journal’s founders believe ecological publishing should look like in the coming decades. As biodiversity loss, climate disruption, and ecosystem degradation continue to dominate the global scientific agenda, the arrival of a new venue committed to making ecological findings instantly and freely available to everyone represents a small but meaningful addition to the infrastructure of a field on which the planet’s future increasingly depends.

Subject of Research: The launch and editorial scope of the open-access journal Discover Ecology

Article Title: Inaugural editorial of Discover Ecology

Article References: Cianfaglione, K., & Hu, R. (2025). Inaugural editorial of Discover Ecology. Discover Ecology, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-025-00002-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-025-00002-z

Keywords: Discover Ecology, Springer Nature, open access, ecology, biodiversity, peer review, conservation, Sustainable Development Goals, interdisciplinary research, ecosystems, scientific publishing, climate action