review articles | Ecology of the past

A recent open letter to Wiley from Associate Editors working for the Journal of Biogeography posted by Lucie Zinger and others highlighted a dispute between the editors and the publishers in relation to: (i) the proposed switch of the journal to a pure open access model, (ii) financial barriers to publication, (iii) the proposed increase in throughput of manuscripts to maximise profits, and (iv) the manuscript referral process (see @LucieZinger, read tweet here, dated 28 June 2023). This got me thinking about these issues in relation to the journal that I am most involved with editing which also published papers related to biogeography; Plant Ecology & Diversity.

Plant Ecology & Diversity is the journal of the Botanical Society of Scotland. It is published in association with Taylor & Francis and any profits are split between the publishers and the academic society. To promote diversity and inclusion among authors the journal has a policy of double blind peer review (and has done for many years). Further, there are no publication fees for authors to publish in this journal, however, this does mean that published papers are behind a pay wall. An “Open Access” option is available to all authors for a fee (hybrid model), although the invited “Grubb Reviews” series is automatically published Open Access. Subject Editors and Associate Editors “work” for the journal gratis (for free) and the love of furthering the field.

If you have manuscripts related to biogeography, and prefer this mode of publishing, then please consider the fit of your paper to Plant Ecology & Diversity and send them our way. Or indeed if you have manuscripts related to one of our other key themes:

evolution and systematics,
global change and vegetation dynamics,
environment and plant functioning, and
biotic interactions.

The journal accepts original research articles (c. 7000 words), rapid communications (c. 2500 words), review articles (c. 12,000 words), and perspectives (c. 2500 words). Other options for publishing are of course also available 🙂

I am delighted to report that I have recently been appointed as an Associate Editor for the journal Vegetation History & Archaeobotany (VHA). The journals scope is global and covers Quaternary environmental and climatic change, with a specific focus on the Holocene and pre-historic human impacts on landscapes; often linking palaeoecological and archaeological research. My remit with VHA is to provide expertise on tropical, and in particular South American, studies. Recent articles in VHA with a South American focus include:

Assessing the influence of glacial-interglacial climate changes on the dry forest vegetation along the southern edge of Amazonia (Whitney et al., 2014),
The role of fire in modifying Amazonian vegetation (Hermanowski et al., 2015), and
Modern pollen-vegetation relationships in Brazil and Argentina (Rodrigues et al., 2016).

I hope that over the next few years we can publish some more exciting articles on the tropics in VHA and I would therefore like to encourage you to submit interesting high quality original research, reviews, or short articles for our consideration.

To find out more about the journal and submit an article click here.