The American Society of Naturalists (ASN) is a scholarly society, not a publishing house. Founded in 1883, it is one of the oldest scientific societies in the Americas devoted to ecology, evolution, and behavior, and its stated purpose is to advance and diffuse knowledge of organic evolution and other broad biological principles. It owns and directs the editorial content of a single journal, The American Naturalist, which is produced and distributed under a long-running partnership with the University of Chicago Press.

That structure matters for authors. When you "submit to ASN," you are in practice submitting to The American Naturalist: the society appoints the Editor-in-Chief and associate editors and sets scope and standards, while University of Chicago Press handles production, licensing, subscriptions, and billing. This guide covers what the journal publishes, its article types and length limits, its open-access routes and charges, its double-anonymous review model, and how to submit.

The American Naturalist is a conceptual journal. Editors look for work that advances general principles in ecology, evolution, and behavior rather than descriptive or narrowly local studies, so choose the format that matches how much conceptual ground your paper covers.

The American Naturalist was founded in 1867 and has been under the society's full editorial control since 1950. It publishes monthly across:

• Evolutionary biology - adaptation, speciation, phylogenetic comparative methods, evolutionary genetics, life-history evolution.
• Ecology - population and community ecology, species interactions, eco-evolutionary dynamics, macroecology.
• Behavior - behavioral ecology, sexual selection, social evolution, signalling.
• Theory - mathematical and simulation models are welcome as standalone contributions when they generate testable general predictions.

The unifying editorial criterion is conceptual reach. Papers that are methodologically sound but framed as a single-system case study are commonly declined without review, so the framing of your introduction and discussion does real work here.

The journal is a hybrid title: subscription by default, with an optional immediate (gold) open-access route and a permissive green self-archiving policy. Charges are set by University of Chicago Press and are revised periodically, so treat the figures below as orientation and confirm the current rates on the journal's instructions page before you submit.

Note that the CC BY-NC option restricts commercial reuse, which some gold-OA funder mandates do not accept; if you are on a CC BY-only mandate, select CC BY explicitly.

• Model: double-anonymous review is required for articles, syntheses, notes, and Natural History Miscellany notes - prepare a manuscript file with author identities removed.
• Editorial screening: an editor triages for conceptual scope first; a substantial share of submissions are returned without external review.
• Handling: an associate editor with subject expertise manages review and recommends to the Editor-in-Chief.
• Revisions: the journal is known for substantive, engaged reviews and often expects more than one revision round.

1. Check scope. Ask whether your paper changes how readers think about a general principle, not just about your study system.
2. Pick the article type and respect the word limit for it.
3. Format references in author-date style following the Chicago Manual of Style, with an alphabetized Literature Cited section.
4. Anonymize the manuscript for double-anonymous review, keeping identifying information in the separate submission metadata.
5. Submit through Editorial Manager - all submissions go through the journal's Editorial Manager site.
6. Plan for data and code deposition in a public repository, cited in the paper.

Editorial ethics follow the University of Chicago Press's journal policies and standard COPE-aligned practice for authorship, competing interests, corrections, and retractions. The journal expects archiving of data and code supporting published results in a recognized public repository, with the accession or DOI cited in the article. Preprints are permitted, and posting a preprint before or during review does not preclude consideration.

Beyond publishing, ASN runs an annual meeting - frequently co-hosted with the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists at the joint Evolution meetings - plus standalone thematic meetings and symposia. It administers awards including the Sewall Wright Award, the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award, the Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Award, and student presentation prizes, and offers travel and research support. Roughly a third of its members are based outside the United States. Membership is worth considering purely on publishing economics if you plan to publish open access in The American Naturalist.