Ten Years of One Ecosystem: How a Data-Driven Ecology Journal Is Rewriting Scientific Publishing

Ten years ago, a new journal set out with an ambition that sounded almost paradoxical: to publish less of the conventional and more of everything else. One Ecosystem – Ecology and Sustainability Data Journal, launched in 2016, was conceived not as another outlet for standard research articles but as a platform for the entire research cycle. Its founding editorial argued that scientific ideas, model and method presentations, workflows, results, data papers, software papers and policy recommendations all deserve recognition, not just the polished end product. A decade on, the journal’s anniversary editorial takes stock of what has been achieved and, more provocatively, of what the next decade of scientific publishing must look like in an era of exploding output and generative artificial intelligence.

The founding premise was that ecology and sustainability science needed a home for outputs that traditional journals struggled to accommodate. Ecosystem services – the multiple benefits people derive from nature – sat at the heart of the journal’s scope, but the editors deliberately widened the aperture to the full, interconnected components of the natural world, including the manifold human activities of land and natural resource use. From the beginning, the journal paired this broad scope with a strict Open Access and Open Data policy, branded

The anniversary editorial does not merely celebrate a milestone; it also situates the journal within a publishing landscape that has changed almost beyond recognition since 2016. The most visible change is sheer volume. Major bibliographic databases such as Web of Science and Scopus record an exponential rise in scientific output over the past decade, with a 47% increase reported across the last ten years. This is not a new phenomenon: bibliometric analyses have shown that publication counts have been climbing for centuries, and the recent acceleration simply continues a long historical trend. What makes the current moment different, however, is that the growth in papers has not been matched by a corresponding growth in the number of active scientists available to review, edit and evaluate them. The result is what has been described as a strain on scientific publishing, in which the voluntary labour underpinning peer review is spread ever thinner across an ever-larger corpus of manuscripts.

This strain manifests most acutely as editor and reviewer fatigue. The problem was already being documented a decade ago, when the journal was founded, and it has only intensified since. Finding motivated peers to assess manuscripts – typically without payment and squeezed between research, teaching and administrative duties – has become one of the most persistent bottlenecks in scholarly communication. The anniversary editorial points to a deceptively simple remedy: if every published author reviewed at least one manuscript in return, the shortage of willing reviewers could probably be substantially alleviated. Such a quid pro quo model would not require new infrastructure or funding, only a cultural shift in how researchers perceive their obligations to the system that publishes their own work. Whether journals can operationalise this principle, for example by tying submission privileges to reviewing records, remains an open question that the coming decade will need to answer.

The third disruptive force is the arrival of generative artificial intelligence, particularly large language models such as ChatGPT, PaLM and BERT and their successors. These tools can draft, summarise, translate and polish text with a fluency that was unthinkable when the journal launched. For authors, they promise efficiency; for editors and reviewers, they raise thorny questions about originality, authorship and the integrity of the peer-review record. The editorial treats AI as one of the defining challenges of the current publishing system, alongside rising output and reviewer fatigue, and it is notable that the journal’s own methodological breadth – from machine and deep learning applications to participatory tools and Earth observation – means its community is both a producer and a consumer of these technologies. The tension between AI as a legitimate research method and AI as a shortcut in manuscript preparation is one that ecological journals, like all scholarly titles, will have to navigate with clear policies and transparent disclosure.

Against this backdrop, the journal’s own trajectory reads as a case study in how a niche title can grow without abandoning its founding principles. The editorial is candid that the journal is not yet a widely recognised name on the global ecological scene, but it reports a consistently positive trajectory through its critical early years. More than 200 publications comprising nearly 5,000 pages have appeared, authored by over 1,000 researchers across six continents. The topical spread is striking: ecosystem services supply and demand, ecosystem disservices, plant and animal biodiversity, invasive species, soil sciences and environmental health, studied across aquatic, coastal, marine, terrestrial, urban, forest and agricultural ecosystems. The methodological repertoire is equally broad, encompassing process-based modelling, ecosystem accounting, Earth observation, field studies, artificial intelligence and deep learning, geographic information systems, participatory tools, genetics and systematic literature reviews. Policy-relevant themes – ecosystem restoration, decision-support tools, environmental planning, nature-based solutions and the development of conceptual frameworks and indicators – recur throughout, reflecting the journal’s roots in applied sustainability science.

Those roots are worth emphasising. The journal was born within the European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 project ESMERALDA, which ran from 2015 to 2018 and focused on enhancing ecosystem services mapping for policy and decision-making, and within the Ecosystem Services Partnership. This origin explains much of the journal’s community character. Branded booths, staffed by loyal editors, authors and reviewers, have become a familiar sight at meetings of ESMERALDA’s successor initiatives, most recently the Horizon Europe-funded project SELINA, as well as at every major conference of the Partnership. Beyond these informal gatherings, the publisher convenes formal online editorial meetings to collect feedback and streamline improvements, and information on the most active editors, reviewers and authors is communicated transparently on the journal’s website. The editorial board itself has grown from 27 Subject Editors in 2016 to 50 today, distributed across the globe and across the full range of ecology and sustainability expertise.

Readership and visibility metrics tell a similar story of steady consolidation. In 2025 alone, more than 100,000 readers saw publications in the journal, generating nearly 300,000 article views, while at least 1,300 people subscribe to the email newsletter and engage regularly with new content. Content is disseminated through the journal’s and publisher’s social media channels and through more than 60 scholarly literature databases, including Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, DOAJ, CABI, EBSCO, ERIH+, FAO AGRIS, GALE Academic OneFile, ProQuest Central and SJR Scimago. In several of these, full-text articles are automatically exported in machine-readable XML format upon publication, a technical detail that matters for text mining and for the machine-actionability of ecological data. Science communication support extends further: studies from the journal are regularly shared with science news reporters around the world, in an effort to bridge the gap between research and the public.

Citation performance has followed a recognisable arc. Citations recorded in Scopus have risen progressively, totalling 2,947 between 2017 and March 2026, with an average of roughly 550 citations per year in 2024 and 2025. The journal was accepted for Scopus indexing in 2019 and is currently classified in five categories spanning agricultural and biological sciences, ecology, conservation and earth sciences. Its CiteScore reached 7.0 in 2021 before a normalisation trend brought it to 4.0 as of 2024, a pattern consistent with the maturation of a young journal as its early publication volume enters the citation window. Acceptance into Web of Science in April 2023 marked another milestone, with indexing in Ecology and Environmental Sciences and a current ranking in the third quartile of both categories. For 2024 the journal’s Impact Factor stands at 1.9, an increase of 0.1 on the previous year, and its Journal Citation Indicator rose by 0.8 compared with 2023.

Perhaps the most distinctive element of the journal’s identity, however, remains the Data Paper format enshrined in its subtitle. The inaugural editorial argued that data papers provide an incentive for scientists to organise their datasets and make them accessible to the wider community, rescuing potentially valuable data from burial on hard drives once a research endeavour ends, and ensuring that dataset authors receive appropriate credit. To lower the barrier further, the journal offers automated import options for data-structured manuscripts generated in various platforms or from authors’ own databases. Yet the anniversary editorial acknowledges, with some disappointment, that this article type has not received the attention it deserves, and it calls for greater awareness and promotion in the future. This is a candid admission with broader significance: even when credit mechanisms and infrastructure exist, cultural incentives within academia – where data papers often count for less than hypothesis-driven articles in hiring and evaluation – can suppress uptake. Changing that calculus may be as important for the next decade of ecology as any technological development.

Taken together, the editorial sketches a vision for the journal’s second decade that is less about expansion for its own sake and more about deepening the model it pioneered: recognising the full research cycle, keeping data and methods open, sustaining a community rooted in ecosystem services research, and confronting the systemic pressures of volume, fatigue and artificial intelligence head-on. Whether niche journals can continue to thrive amid these pressures is one of the live questions of scholarly publishing, and the journal’s first ten years offer at least one data point in favour of cautious optimism.

Subject of Research: The tenth anniversary of the One Ecosystem ecology journal and its approach to open data publishing and AI governance in scientific communication.

Article Title: Ten years of innovation and the way ahead in scientific publishing in One Ecosystem

Article References: Burkhard, B., Maes, J., Geneletti, D., Boyadzhieva, I., Stoev, P., & Penev, L. (2026). Ten years of innovation and the way ahead in scientific publishing in One Ecosystem. One Ecosystem, 11, Article e194694. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.11.e194694

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.11.e194694

Keywords: One Ecosystem, scientific publishing, open access, data papers, ecosystem services, artificial intelligence, peer review, FAIR principles, Pensoft, ARPHA, sustainability science, journal metrics