The academic study of ‘Animal Behavior’ attempts to comprehend the actions and interactions of different animal species within diverse ecosystems. Ultimately, this is a field which has the potential to educate ourselves about our own behavior and our own unique place within the web of interactions which make up life on Earth. To showcase the outstanding animal behavior research currently being published in PeerJ we have created a new “PeerJ Spotlight” Collection which collects some of the best articles we have published so far.
Figure 1 from Plotnik and de Waal. Photograph taken by E. Gilchrist at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, Chiang Rai, Thail
A wide cross-section of the general public is fascinated by this field, and so it is particularly significant that so many animal behavior researchers are choosing to publish their work in an open access format (‘animal behavior’ is in PeerJ’s top five most highly published subject areas) .
This collection of articles represents some of the most noteworthy animal behavior research which PeerJ has published from launch through November 2014. To compile the list we asked some of our most active Academic Editors in this area (as noted here) to nominate articles which stood out to them. The result is a subjective snapshot of the most interesting animal behavior research appearing in PeerJ today. This selection of articles ranges across the entire field, from studies on primates, to mammals, to songbirds, crabs and bees! The authors of almost all of these articles also chose to make their peer-review history public, making them even more useful for the community.
This Collection will remain live for 4 months, after which time we will have new papers to highlight in a new collection. If you would like to nominate a subject area for future PeerJ ‘top’ Collections, just email us at info@peerj.com or tweet us with the hashtag #peerjspotlight.
We thank our Academic Editors Jennifer Wagner, Dezene Huber, Alex Ford and Dany Garant for their invaluable input in compiling this list.
If you are a researcher working in this area, then we encourage you to submit your next articles to PeerJ (and don’t forget we have a free publication offer from now till Dec 19th).