Frontiers in Zoology Marks Editorial Transition with New Section-Based Structure

A quiet but consequential change of leadership has just taken place at one of zoology’s most established open-access journals, and it arrives bundled with a structural overhaul that could reshape how animal-science manuscripts travel from submission to publication. Frontiers in Zoology, the journal of the German Zoological Society (DZG), announced in an editorial published on 9 October 2026 that Ulrich Technau stepped down as Co-Editor-in-Chief in July 2026 after twelve years in the role, and that Stefan Richter, Professor of General and Special Zoology at the University of Rostock, has been appointed as his successor. The announcement, authored by Co-Editor-in-Chief Angelika Stollewerk of Queen Mary University of London, is more than a farewell note: it lays out a new editorial architecture built around disciplinary sections that the journal says will make the full breadth of modern zoology more visible to authors and readers alike.

Technau joined the journal as Co-Editor-in-Chief in 2014, succeeding Diethard Tautz, and for more than a decade led the journal alongside Jürgen Heinze. Following Heinze’s departure at the end of 2024, Stollewerk joined as Co-Editor-in-Chief in January 2025, and the two worked together until Technau’s departure this summer. That handover sequence matters for continuity, because editorial leadership transitions at society-owned journals are often the moments when scope, standards and community relationships either drift or consolidate. The editorial frames Technau’s tenure as a period of stability for the journal’s scientific quality and its deliberately broad zoological remit, a claim that carries weight given how fragmented the discipline has become over the same period.

The fragmentation is worth unpacking, because it explains why the journal’s next move is significant rather than merely administrative. Zoology today is not a single field but a federation of them: molecular evolution, developmental biology, physiology, morphology, behaviour, ecology, systematics, evolutionary biology and biodiversity science all study animals, yet they often publish in disjointed venues, use different methods, and speak different technical languages. A journal that claims to span that range needs editors who can evaluate work far outside their own specialisation, or an editorial board whose collective expertise covers the entire territory. Technau’s own research program illustrates the kind of integrative perspective the journal has prized. Working with cnidarians, the group that includes corals, jellyfish and sea anemones, he investigates the origin and evolution of animal body plans, using genomic, molecular and developmental approaches to probe fundamental features of animal organisation such as germ layers and nervous systems. Cnidarians occupy a pivotal position on the animal tree, sitting outside the bilaterians, which makes them powerful models for asking which aspects of animal development were present in the common ancestor of all animals and which arose later. That expertise in molecular evolution and evolutionary developmental biology, the editorial notes, has been particularly valuable for a journal dedicated to integrating the many disciplines of modern zoology.

Beyond manuscript-level judgement, the editorial highlights a less visible but arguably more consequential part of the job: building the editorial board itself. The quality of a journal’s peer review depends heavily on whether its Associate Editors collectively cover the field’s diversity, and on whether those editors are drawn from the international community rather than a narrow network. Technau is credited with identifying and recruiting Associate Editors from different areas of zoology and from around the world, cultivating the close exchange between Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors that shapes a journal’s scientific profile while tying it to the wider research community. Stollewerk also offers a personal note of thanks, describing the collaboration since her arrival in January 2025 as marked by thoughtful judgement and a willingness to discuss both individual manuscripts and broader editorial questions, which she credits with easing her own transition into the role. On behalf of the journal, its Editorial Board and the DZG, she extends warm thanks for his twelve years of commitment.

The incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief brings a complementary profile. Stefan Richter’s research spans morphology, systematics, phylogenetics and evolutionary biology, with a particular focus on understanding organismal diversity and evolutionary relationships. Where Technau’s work reached down to the genomic and developmental basis of body-plan features, Richter’s tradition reaches across the comparative anatomy and phylogenetic reconstruction that have long anchored zoological classification. He also arrives with substantial editorial experience from a number of journals in zoology, systematics and evolutionary biology, which should shorten the learning curve that typically accompanies a handover of this kind. In practical terms, the pairing suggests the journal intends to keep one foot in molecular and developmental zoology and the other in organismal and comparative biology, the two poles between which much of the discipline’s integration problem lies.

Richter’s connection to the journal’s founding society is unusually direct. He served on the Executive Board of the German Zoological Society for many years and was the DZG’s President in 2017 and 2018. The editorial argues that his appointment comes at an especially appropriate time, because Frontiers in Zoology is currently strengthening the integration between the journal and the society that founded it. That relationship is not cosmetic. Society journals live or die by their standing within their disciplinary communities, and the DZG’s subdiscipline groups represent precisely the network of specialists a broad-scope journal needs to draw upon for review, section leadership and agenda-setting.

The concrete expression of that integration is a new editorial structure now being introduced. The expertise of the Editorial Board is being organised into the major subdisciplines of zoology, and authors will be able to submit their work directly to the section most appropriate for their research. Members of the DZG’s corresponding subdiscipline groups have joined the journal as Section Editors and will help develop these sections, further strengthening the connection between the international Editorial Board and the scientific community represented by the society. For authors, the immediate effect is navigational: rather than a single undifferentiated stream of submissions, papers on, say, neurobiology, systematics or behavioural ecology will enter through dedicated channels staffed by editors from those communities. That can shorten the distance between a submission and an editor who genuinely understands the field, improve the matching of reviewers, and signal to readers that the journal’s scope is not nominal but actively curated.

The editorial is careful to frame the reform as an affirmation of an old principle rather than a departure from it. Since its foundation, the journal has operated on the premise that zoology gains its strength from the diversity of its disciplines and from bringing together different approaches to understanding animals, from molecules, development and physiology to morphology, behaviour, ecology, evolution, systematics and biodiversity. The new sections are intended to make that breadth more visible while maintaining the high standards of scientific quality that remain at the heart of the journal. In other words, the structural change is presented as a visibility problem solved: the breadth already existed in the board’s expertise, and the sections simply expose it.

The timing also reflects broader pressures on scientific publishing. Journals across the life sciences are competing for submissions in an environment where preprints, megajournals and specialised outlets all pull at authors’ loyalties, and where society journals must demonstrate added value beyond a brand name. Direct-to-section submission is one of the mechanisms journals use to differentiate themselves, because it promises faster, better-informed editorial triage. For a journal owned by a national zoological society and published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, the calculation is clear: the more visibly the journal maps onto the society’s own disciplinary structure, the more it becomes the natural home for that community’s output, and the more the society’s members have a stake in its success.

What happens next will be watched by authors in organismal biology, a community that has watched several broad-scope zoology venues narrow or reposition over the past decade. The editorial closes with a double gesture that captures the moment: a welcome to Richter and a commitment to work with the Editorial Board, the DZG and the journal’s authors to develop the journal and promote excellent research across the full breadth of zoology, alongside a renewed thanks to Technau for twelve years of dedicated service and best wishes for his future. Leadership changes at journals rarely make headlines, but in a discipline as sprawling as zoology, who sits in the editor’s chair, and how the editorial machinery is organised beneath them, shapes which questions get published, which communities feel at home, and ultimately which strands of animal science stay connected to one another. Frontiers in Zoology has bet that the answer lies in formalising its breadth, one section at a time.

Subject of Research: Editorial leadership transition and new section-based editorial structure at the journal Frontiers in Zoology

Article Title: Continuity and new perspectives at Frontiers in Zoology

Article References: Stollewerk, A. (2026). Continuity and new perspectives at Frontiers in Zoology. Frontiers in Zoology, 23(1), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-026-00636-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12983-026-00636-z

Keywords: Frontiers in Zoology, zoology, editorial leadership, German Zoological Society, Stefan Richter, Ulrich Technau, evolutionary developmental biology, systematics, open access publishing, editorial board, phylogenetics, scientific journals