Conference inspiration from India

July and August were filled with conferences and workshops, of which most took place online as a consequence of the still unfavourable conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 54th Congress of International Society of Applied Ethology (ISAE), for which Applied Animal Behaviour Science is the official journal, was held from 2 to 6 August, 2021.

The conference has been already postponed once from the original date in 2020, and unfortunately, it was still not possible to be held at its intended venue in Bangalore, India. Instead, 373 people from 43 countries participated virtually. The Indian theme was maintained and this provided the opportunity to learn more about the applied ethological research conducted in India.

In 2020, India was among the top 5 countries submitting most frequently to Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Unfortunately, the rejection rate for manuscripts from India was 86%, with 77% being desk rejections and 9% being rejected after peer-review. The average rejection rate of the journal is quite stable across time and is around 60–65%, with ca 50% desk rejections (rejection before peer-review). The higher than average rejection rate in some countries is of the editors’ (and publisher’s) concern, and for that reason we held a workshop during this year’s ISAE international congress.

The workshop ‘Getting your manuscript published’ addressed, among others, the main reasons for rejections and provided some solutions for how to prevent a manuscript from being rejected. The rejection rate is generally higher for manuscripts coming from developing countries, and we aimed to provide more insight in why rejection occurs, so that in the future it can be prevented. Fig. 1, which was presented at the workshop, shows the main reasons for (mainly desk) rejection, by journal category (Fig. 1A: farm animals; Fig. 1B: non-farm animals) and by region based on the ISAE classifications for developing regions (Chou and Camerlink, 2021). What becomes visible is that most manuscripts are rejected based on being not in the scope of the journal, and that this is especially the case for manuscripts from developing regions. These manuscripts may also have other reasons for rejection, such as poor study design, but only one main reason was given per manuscript, whereby out-of-scope is being classified first.

Fig. 1.

The reasons for rejection of manuscripts submitted to Applied Animal Behaviour Science between January and July 2021, for ISAE development regions and the other ISAE regions. 1A shows the manuscripts on farm animals (n = 59: 46 for developing regions and 13 for other regions), whereas 1B shows manuscript for all non-farm species (n = 38: 26 for developing regions and 12 for other regions).

Manuscripts that are out of scope loose precious time in getting the manuscript published. First, the editor will need to make the decision and then the manuscript needs to be prepared for another journal. Carefully checking the scope of a journal is therefore important. Applied Animal Behaviour Science includes in its scope studies on the behaviour of domestic and captive animals, with applied relevance. Out of scope manuscripts mostly lack sufficient behavioural data, or are not on applied animal behaviour.

When considering the Indian manuscripts, for some animal behaviour researchers the scope may not fit (e.g., if the behaviour of a non-domesticated species was assessed in its natural habitat, independently of human-animal interactions), while for others from India it does fit with their research, for example on captive wildlife (Goswami et al., 2021, Varadharajan et al., 2016), free-ranging dogs (Pal et al., 2021, Sarkar et al., 2019) and livestock (Devi et al., 2019).

At the ISAE conference, the Wood-Gush memorial lecture was given by Dr K. Ullas Karanth. While his groundbreaking work on the ecology and population dynamics of tigers (Karanth et al., 2004) and other wild Indian mammals would not fit within the scope of the journal, we would like to take the opportunity in this editorial to mention his work. His awe-inspiring work on tigers identification (Karanth and Nichols, 1998), using capture-recapture models (Karanth, 1995), reached beyond the boundaries of his study subjects. In his lecture, he showed how he not just observed the tigers, but also their interrelation with the surroundings. In his macro-ecological approach, Dr Karanth dedicated his efforts to educate local stakeholders about conservation and wildlife biology, and worked with the governments to improve the livelihoods of over 2200 families who lived in rural areas that overlapped tigers’ territories, thereby reducing human-wildlife conflicts (e.g., Treves and Karanth, 2003).

A lesson learned from this conference was that we can learn a lot from looking beyond our common study species and research topics. Dr Karanth showed with his plenary lecture that a researcher can have a major impact on the welfare of animals as well as on the livelihoods of people. It is an inspiration to be reminded of the fact that, as animal behaviour researcher, it is possible to make a large scale change for the benefit of our planet and its inhabitants.

The editors.