The scientists serving as journal editors play a crucial role in defining the trajectory of knowledge in Ecology. Editors also play a critical but underappreciated role in shaping the community of scientists that lead their discipline. When recommending the publication of an article, the editor confers legitimacy not only on the research but on those that carried it out. Second, editors help select other editors, and hence confer status and visibility on a limited group of scientists that can then take advantage of the benefits for professional advancement resulting from board service. Editors are therefore a small but powerful group of “Gatekeepers” that select the scientists and ideas central to determining the direction of their field. Nevertheless, studies of editorial board composition remain surprisingly rare. Using metrics for quantifying the diversity of ecological communities, I quantified the international and institutional diversity of the editorial boards of 26 journals publishing ecological research. These data, as well as code used to carry out author disambiguation and analyses, were collected as part of The Gatekeeper Project - an international “crowdsourced” effort to compare editorial board composition across disciplines (http://brunalab.org/gatekeepers/)
Results/Conclusions
From 1985-2014 over 4000 different scientists based in > 70 countries served as editors. The size of the editorial community increased over time – the number of editors serving in 2014 was four-fold greater than in 1985 – as did the number of countries in which editors were based. Despite this, the diversity of editorial boards has remained consistently low for the last three decades. This is because editors based outside the Global North were extremely rare, with most (>65%) based in either the USA or UK. Similar patterns were observed for institutional representation. For example of editors based in the USA, over 85% were based at a limited number of PhD-granting institutions with most of the remainder at government agencies; almost none were based at primarily undergraduate institutions or those awarding primarily Master’s degrees, and none were based at tribal colleges and universities. I argue that this limited geographic and institutional diversity can detrimentally affect the creativity of scholarship published in journals and the progress and direction of research. By excluding most ecological scientists from an important form of professional development, it can also limit the composition of the scientific community.