We at Integrative and Comparative Biology are excited to initiate a new series in the journal, the Editors’ Challenges. These challenges are intended as a mechanism to generate cross-disciplinary discourse on topics of broad importance. In other words, our aspiration is to create an enduring outlet for products resembling the ‘Grand Challenges in Organismal Biology’ papers published several years ago in our journal.
Our first Editor’s Challenge will address ‘Stress.’ To generate material for this Challenge, we encourage you to define ‘stress’ at the following SurveyMonkey link, which will be open until at least June 30, 2017. On that site, you can also express your interest in participating in a follow-up workshop to be held on the morning of January 3, 2018, at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco. The URL is https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NFNY9R2 Shortly after the survey closes, the Associate Editors and I will summarize the results (and post the raw responses online (anonymously)). That summary and the associated stress definitions will serve as the basis of the workshop mentioned above. At that workshop, participants will seek a level of conceptual synthesis for the concept, stress, or at least opportunities for important future research. Workshop proceedings and outcomes will be described in manuscripts by 2-3 groups of authors (to be decided at the workshop), with (ideally) one manuscript attempting to synthesize the entire effort (i.e., stress definitions, Editors’ Challenge, and the other manuscripts arising from the workshop). The entire series will then be published in 2018 (after typical peer-review) in ICB. Importantly, we editors see this effort as the first of many of its kind. To that end, if there is an integrative, complex topic that you’d like to see covered in a future Editor’s Challenge (e.g., health, inheritance, etc.), please contact me. On behalf of the ICB Associate Editors, thanks for your participation! Lynn B. (Marty) Martin Editor-in-Chief, Integrative and Comparative Biology
