“Ecosystem” is a term one often hears bandied about when describing the connected realm of the research community and the scholarly publishing industry. While not a perfect metaphor, it does capture the complex nature of a system that has continued to build and evolve for hundreds of years. Make a change in one area and you set loose a wave of changes, often unintended or unanticipated, in other areas.

As an example, the fascinating video below, on what happened when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, 70 years after they had vanished from the area. Over time the deer population in the park had massively grown due to the absence of one of their primary predators. The reintroduction of a small number of wolves changed not only the population levels of the deer, but their behaviors as well, which set off a complex trophic cascade, impacting animals from song birds to bears, greatly altering plant life and even reaching so far as to impact the physical geography of the park.

Fascinating stuff, and something to keep in the back of your mind before making that one small tweak to a complex system like publishing…