E4 Award

The Ecography Award for Excellence in Ecology and Evolution, the E4 Award, is given to an early career research scientist (criteria below) who submits an exceptional Review manuscript that is accepted for publication.

The review should focus on spatial and/or temporal patterns, particularly studies of population and community ecology, macroecology, biogeography, ecological genetics, historical ecology, evolution, macroevolution, and conservation. If the award is given for a paper with multiple authors (the lead and corresponding authors must be early career) those meeting the early career research criteria at the time of publication will share the monetary prize.

The winner of the E4 Award will receive 1000€ cash and the runner-up will receive 500€. All E4 papers that are accepted will appear in a special issue in Ecography. To increase visibility and readership, we will actively promote E4 award papers on social media, and we encourage authors to write blog posts and create video abstracts. Our early-career E4 award papers are more downloaded and cited than the average research paper for Ecography. In addition, they tend to have high altmetrics scores.

As Ecography is a full gold Open Access journal we charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) for all accepted papers. If the winner and the runner-up have no means to cover the APC, they may apply for a waiver, as part of the Award prize. More and more funders / institutions / universities have unique agreements with Wiley, where part of the APC or the full APC is covered. Please read more here. In addition, Wiley offers waivers and discounts to corresponding authors based in developing countries. Read more here.

To apply for the E4, please submit a brief (< 300 word) proposal as a .pdf for a concise review paper in one of the areas listed above by 31 March to ecography@oikosoffice.lu.se, with “The E4 Award” in the subject line. Please also give names of all authors, affiliations, email address to contact author and date of PhD for all authors, after the title on the proposal. About 4 weeks later an invitation to submit will be sent to the proposals that made it to the next step. The deadline for submitting a full Review paper will be 30 September.

A manuscript-selection committee will evaluate these applications and choose a subset of proposals to invite to submit a review manuscript. These reviews do not need to cover an entire research area, and in fact can be concise summaries (< 5000 words) of particularly novel areas of research in spatial or temporal ecology, evolution, or conservation.

The manuscript-selection selection committee will review these full submissions from the finalists and send the submissions out for peer review, if they meet the basic criteria for an E4 paper.

Accepted submissions will then be reassessed by an award-decision committee that will choose the winner and runner-up of the E4. All submissions, whether or not they win a prize, have the opportunity to appear in Ecography if they meet the journals standards.

Author Criteria: The winner must have finished her/his PhD no more than 12 years prior to the deadline (MSc students and PhD students are also eligible). Ecography realizes that life intervenes occasionally, so this cut-off is meant to be a suggestion and not a hard requirement. However, applicants should provide an explanation if they are requesting an exception (e.g. absence due to family leave, dramatic shifts in research area, etc.).

Manuscript selection committee and handling editors: Rob Colwell, Suzette Flantua and Robert Holt

Award-decision committee: Christine Meynard, Dominique Gravel and Jens-Christian Svenning