Behaviour is one of the oldest and most esteemed journals in our field, founded by Nobel Prize winner Niko Tinbergen and W.H. Thorpe in 1948. The past 12 months have brought some significant changes for Behaviour. In late 2023, the long-time publisher of Behaviour, Koninklijke Brill NV, based in Leiden, joined with De Gruyter, headquartered in Berlin, to create De Gruyter Brill (https://degruyterbrill.com/en/). One fallout of this merger is that Paul Albers, who has served honourably as Technical Editor for Behaviour for more than 20 years, will be leaving the journal at the end of 2024. In March 2024, we lost Editor-in-Chief Frans de Waal to cancer. De Waal has meant a lot to our journal (Kret et al., 2024) and in order to honour him Behaviour introduced a Frans de Waal prize (see https://x.com/Brill_Biology/status/1849430389787390415/photo/1) for an outstanding PhD thesis, along with an annual Frans de Waal lecture. Currently, Behaviour has two Editors-in-Chief, Brian Wisenden and Mariska Kret.
Change is a catalyst for growth and transformation. Working with Suzanne Mekking, Head of Life Sciences at De Gruyter Brill, we discussed current challenges facing the journal, and future opportunities and initiatives for 2025 and beyond to adapt to new advances in the field of behavioural biology and seismic shifts in the way in which research articles are published.
1. Expansion of scope of topics in the field of behavioural biology
The field of behavioural biology has broadened and diversified enormously in the past ten, or even five years. We will continue to seek and publish the type of articles that we have always published, but within the framework of Tinbergen’s four questions there are many exciting new and emerging areas that have not been reflected in the articles published in Behaviour. For example, we will now actively encourage submissions that report new findings in molecular applications to proximate mechanisms of behaviour (e.g., Calisi & MacManes, 2015; Walton et al., 2020; Dayal et al., 2024), machine learning (e.g., Valletta et al., 2017; Hardin & Schlupp, 2022), artificial intelligence (e.g., Packard et al., 2021), robotics (e.g., Frohnwieser et al., 2016; Gao et al., 2019) and even plant behaviour (e.g., van Loon, 2016; Trewavas et al., 2020) among others. To facilitate solicitation and peer review of this broader scope of behavioural biology, the journal will significantly expand the editorial board.
2. Expansion in the types of articles
The vast majority of articles historically and currently published in Behaviour are the outcome of Experimental tests of hypotheses that map onto one or more of Tinbergen’s four questions. We will continue to welcome these submissions. Anecdotes are observations of novel behaviours that pique the curiosity of animal behaviourists and ultimately stimulate the generation of testable hypotheses (e.g., Sándor & Miklosi, 2020). Rather than burying these observations in one’s field notes, anecdotes will be a regular feature of the journal to make the journal a place where hypotheses are both tested and generated. We will be more proactive in organizing Special Issues that bring together submissions around a common theme or subarea of behavioural biology. Special issues create synergies because authors of related articles are able to respond to companion articles within the special issue before they are published. Thus, a coherent edited volume of content is produced on a common topic. The combined articles in a special issue create both a review and prospectus for future work in that subarea. Please reach out to us with proposals for topics for special issues. We also welcome Reviews, either as a component of a special issue or as stand-alone submissions.
3. Prompt peer review and short time to first decision
Insightful and constructive peer review is at the core of the integrity of peer-reviewed research. Timely peer review is a service that editorial staff provide to authors. We are committed to return a first decision to authors within one month. This will mean more pressure on associate editors to follow up on ignored or declined invitations to review a submitted manuscript, and goad reviewers to complete the review in a timely manner. In addition, associate editors will take an active role in soliciting manuscript submissions from their respective research communities.
We look forward to an exciting new chapter in the journal’s long and storied history.
Sincerely,
References
Calisi, R.M. & MacManes, M.D. (2015). RNAseq-ing a more integrative understanding of animal behavior. — Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 6: 65-68.
Dayal, S., Chaubey, D., Joshi, D.C., Ranmale, S. & Pillai, B. (2024). Noncoding RNAs: emerging regulators of behavioral complexity. — Wiley Interdiscip. Rev.: RNA 15: e1847.
Frohnwieser, A., Murray, J.C., Pike, T.W. & Wilkinson, A. (2016). Using robots to understand animal cognition. — J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 105: 14-22.
Gao, Z., Shi, Q., Fukuda, T., Li, C. & Huang, Q. (2019). An overview of biomimetic robots with animal behaviors. — Neurocomputing 332: 339-350.
Hardin, A. & Schlupp, I. (2022). Using machine learning and DeepLabCut in animal behavior. — Acta Ethol. 25: 125-133.
Kret, M.E., Albers, P.C.H. & Wisenden, B.D. (2024). Frans de Waal (1948–2024): Editor-in-Chief of Behaviour. — Behaviour 161: 505-509.
Packard, J.M., Folse, L.J., Stone, N.D., Makela, M.E. & Coulson, R.N. (2021). Applications of artificial intelligence to animal behavior. — In: Interpretation and explanation in the study of animal behavior. (Bekoff, P.D., ed.). Routledge, Abingdon, p. 147-191.
Sándor, K. & Miklósi, Á. (2020). How to report anecdotal observations? A new approach based on a lesson from “puffin tool use”. — Front. Psychol. 11: 555487.
Trewavas, A., Baluška, F., Mancuso, S. & Calvo, P. (2020). Consciousness facilitates plant behavior. — Trends Plant Sci. 25: 216-217.
Valletta, J.J., Torney, C., Kings, M., Thornton, A. & Madden, J. (2017). Applications of machine learning in animal behaviour studies. — Anim. Behav. 124: 203-220.
van Loon, L.C. (2016). The intelligent behavior of plants. — Trends Plant Sci. 21: 286-294.
Walton, A., Sheehan, M.J. & Toth, A.L. (2020). Going wild for functional genomics: RNA interference as a tool to study gene-behavior associations in diverse species and ecological contexts. — Horm. Behav. 124: 104774.