Multifunctional Morphologies

Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB), formerly American Zoologist, is one of the most highly respected and cited journals in the field of organismal biology. 

ICB accepts many types of articles, including original research, reviews, perspectives, and is always open to exploring new ways to uplift scholarly voices.

Find out more about some of our article formats under the tab Article types. 

ICB is dedicated to an inclusive publishing process. Please reach out to ICB with your manuscript idea and we are happy to provide advice and guidelines to support your writing process.

Authors publishing their article in ICB are entitled to 12-15 free-to-publish pages (roughly 600 to 700 words per page) upon acceptance. 

ICB is a subscription model journal, and all articles are free to read online between one and five years after publication. Some special issues and articles are free to read upon publication.

For further details see: https://academic.oup.com/icb

Initial submission. The window for submission is between October 1, 2026 and March 1, 2027. Stay tuned for more details on virtual meetings to facilitate collaborations and manuscript writing.

Developing your manuscript. ICB offers writing workshops and information sessions about the submission process. To request a workshop, contact Suzanne Miller (icbjournal@sicb.org).

You can find the slide decks for these and other workshops on this website under the tab Writing.

To facilitate peer feedback, we invite authors to share their manuscript drafts with other authors participating in this special issue.

For more info on this special issue, you can also contact:

Dr. Yordano Jimenez

email: yjimenez@providence.edu

One of the central concepts in evolutionary biology is that organisms adapt and survive by recycling and repurposing existing structures. We invite papers that explore these fascinating structures and systems that defy rigid functional boundaries.

Papers in this special issue will:

• Focus on structures or systems that serve multiple functions.

• Explore the mechanisms, origins, trade-offs, enhancements, challenges, and/or opportunities of multifunctional morphologies. This can be at various scales, including between structures, within individuals, between species, across taxa.

• Deepen our understanding of organismal integration at various scales using quantitative or numerical methods.

We are looking to advance work that proposes or establishes causal mechanisms and relationships. These can include original data, syntheses of existing data, or conceptual frameworks that propose quantitative pathways for exploring and resolving our understanding of multi-functional structures. We are also excited to receive submissions of behavioral studies. Given the challenges of interpreting behavior in light of compensatory mechanisms and functional redundancies, we do ask that such studies include a quantitative framework that addresses causality and mechanism.

If you are interested, please contact Dr. Jimenez by June 1st, 2025.