Meeting Abstract
Two journals are published by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology SICB: Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB) and Integrative Organismal Biology (IOB). Both journals serve the SICB community by bringing scientific publishing into the 21st century. In over 50 years of publishing peer reviewed articles based on SICB symposia ICB has become a go to resource for foundational and forward looking work in organismal biology. The brand new IOB is published as an open access journal, and has introduced double-blind peer review, a mindful editorial process focused on constructive guidance, and multilingual abstracts. Both ICB and IOB have built inclusive editorial boards and promote authors and their science through social media. In 2019, both IOB and ICB achieved high scores in both traditional, citation-based metrics as well as complementary social-media based metric: IOB was ranked first among biology journals for its social media metrics (Altmetrics); ICB achieved its highest impact factor to date (3.101). Both journals successfully cooperate to serve the SICB community, and both journals strive to lead through increasing equity and transparency in the scientific publication process. ICB will be on the cutting edge of symposia development by instigating both hybrid symposia and virtual symposia to increase diversity and participation. IOB is soliciting manuscripts on best practices, reviews and commentary adjacent to ICB symposium topics, as well as a diversity of original data manuscripts from all of SICBs divisions. Our journals serve the society in many ways and we count on the membership to think of the journals as places to publish their best work. After the talk we will actively solicit your opinions on new initiatives, such as on equity, accessibility and transparency.
