Tag: journal

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New Editors-in-Chief join the lead at invasion science journal NeoBiota

NeoBiota, a leading peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to the study of alien species and biological invasions, announces the appointment of new Editors-in-Chief. 

The new leadership team sees Dr. Ana Novoa Perez, Prof. Tammy Robinson, Prof. Phil Hulme and Dr. Andrew (“Sandy”) Liebhold join forces to bring a wealth of expertise to NeoBiota. 

They have already begun working in close collaboration with Prof. Ingolf Kühn, who has been serving as Editor-in-Chief ever since the journal was founded in 2011. Throughout these years, he has played a pivotal role in establishing NeoBiota as a leading platform for invasion science, contributing to the journal’s growth and impact. 

Cover of The economic costs of biological invasions around the world, one of NeoBiota’s most successful special issues

“After more than 13 years, I thought that it was time to hand the responsibilities for NeoBiota over to dedicated colleagues. We thought of our dream team, and fortunately, all agreed without hesitation.”

Covering both an extensive range of invasion science fields and a wide international representation, this diverse editorial team will be looking to maintain NeoBiota‘s reputation as a leading outlet in its field and expand its global reach and impact.

Today, NeoBiota is one of the most prominent open-access journals in biological invasions, with a Journal Impact Factor of 3.8 and a Scopus CiteScore of 8.1 for 2023. Currently, the journal ranks 11th in the Biodiversity Conservation category on Web of Science and 9th in the Ecological Modelling category on Scopus.

Meet the editors

Dr. Ana Novoa is a scientist at the Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EEZA-CSIC) in Spain and the Institute of Botany of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Her research explores the socioecological factors influencing the invasion and management of alien species, with a particular interest in the human and social dimensions of biological invasions. She is also Secretary of the European Group on Biological Invasions (NEOBIOTA).

“I’m honored to collaborate with Ingolf, Tammy, Phil and Sandy in guiding the journal forward,” said Ana. “I look forward to supporting innovative research across the diverse aspects of invasion science.”

Prof. Tammy Robinson holds a Research Chair at the Centre for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is a marine invasion biologist with an ecological background, an interest in evidence-based management of alien species, and a focus on protected areas. She is an associate member of INVASIVESNET, the global network of networks on invasive species. 

“I’m really excited about joining this dynamic team,” said Tammy. “I’m looking forward to fostering an increase in the number of aquatic papers that appear in NeoBiota.”

Prof. Philip Hulme is a Distinguished Professor of Plant Biosecurity at Lincoln University, New Zealand, and Director of the Centre for One Biosecurity Research, Analysis and Synthesis (COBRAS). His research focuses on predicting risks associated with plant invasions, examining traits of successful invasive species, identifying introduction pathways, assessing spread rates, evaluating habitat vulnerability, quantifying impacts, and predicting the influence of climate change on invasive species distributions. His work also includes broader assessments of biosecurity policy and implementation across the human, animal, plant and ecosystem sectors, emphasizing human perspectives, such as trade and economic impacts. Having authored, reviewed, and edited numerous papers in NeoBiota, he was also one of the people behind the journal’s foundation.

“Having been involved with the journal since its foundation it is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to shape its future and continue the amazing work Ingolf has undertaken to ensure NeoBiota is THE leading biological invasions journal in the world”.

Dr. Andrew “Sandy” Liebhold is a lead scientist with the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, where he directs The Forest Risk Research Centre. He is also a Scientist Emeritus with the U.S. Forest Service. His research focuses on the macroecology, population ecology, community ecology, and management of insect invasions. He has received numerous awards, including the IUFRO Scientific Achievement Award and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Entomological Society of America. 

“I am excited about being part of the NeoBiota editorial team and look forward to working with my colleagues to continue the journal’s high level of excellence and advance the field of invasion biology.”

Meet the NeoBiota journal

Founded in 2011 after participants at the 6th NEOBIOTA conference in Copenhagen agreed that a new international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal would definitely benefit the research community, and published by Pensoft Publishers, NeoBiota focuses  on the mechanisms and consequences of biological invasions across all disciplines.

Featuring research on the ecology, evolution, biogeography and human and social dimensions of biological invasions, the journal is committed to publishing high-quality research on the introduction, establishment, spread, and management of invasive alien species worldwide. As biological invasions pose a set of social, legal, and policy challenges, NeoBiota is keen on exploring how they can be managed and controlled.

New NeoBiota special issue: tackling invasive alien forest pests in Europe

The open-access journal prides itself on a rapid publication process, typically completing publication within 1-2 weeks after a manuscript’s acceptance. NeoBiota also supports advanced data publishing workflows, strongly encouraging open data publication. This commitment to open access and rapid publication, combined with a broad, interdisciplinary scope, makes it a leading journal in the field of invasion science. 

“The onboarding of additional well-renowned Editors-in-chief at NeoBiota promises a dynamic new chapter for the journal. There is no doubt that the team’s diverse expertise and commitment to open science will set the journal on a positive trajectory as one of the leading academic outlets in invasion science,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.

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ARPHA Platform welcomes new journal launched by Pensoft: Individual-based Ecology

Scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft has launched Individual-based Ecology (IBE), a new peer-reviewed, diamond open-access journal established to promote an individual-based perspective in ecology.

IBE aims to bridge the gap between individual-level responses and broader ecological patterns. In the face of global challenges, the journal is looking to contribute to both a better understanding and new sets of predictions of how ecological systems will respond to anthropogenic change. It aims to support the development of appropriate mitigation and restoration measures by focusing on the entities that actually and directly respond to change, i.e. individual organisms.

The journal embraces basic and applied, theoretical and empirical research in terrestrial and aquatic ecology. It welcomes contributions that incorporate data or novel insights about individual organisms and their interactions that are relevant to explaining system-level dynamics. IBE will publish a wide range of articles, including empirical, experimental, and modeling studies, as well as reviews, perspectives, and methodological papers.

As a diamond open-access journal, IBE is currently free to publish and free to read, ensuring that all published research is freely accessible to the global community.

The journal will utilise Pensoft’s innovative ARPHA platform, known for its robust support of academic publishing and efficient dissemination of research. Thanks to its fast-track publishing solution, the new journal offers a seamless, end-to-end publishing experience, encompassing all stages between manuscript submission and article publication, indexation, dissemination and permanent archiving. The publishing services provided by ARPHA also include a variety of human-provided services and integrations with third-party providers, intended to maximise the reach and usability of scholarly knowledge published in IBE.

IBE will be led by four editors-in-chief: Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm and Prof. Dr. Karin Frank of Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Prof. Dr. Mark E. Hauber of The City University of New York, and Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch of the University of Potsdam.

A banner of IBE presented at the German Ecological Society’s 53rd annual conference

„We are excited to launch Individual-based Ecology, a new, promising journal that will contribute to a better understanding of ecological systems and how we interact with them,” said Prof Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA and Pensoft.

“The time has come to establish individual-based ecology as an important complement to all other branches of ecology, both because we need it to fully understand and predict the response of ecological systems to change, and because empirical and modelling approaches have reached a level where the collection and use of individual-based data has become possible,” says Prof Volker Grimm, one of the editors-in-chief.

“It is exciting to be able to launch a journal that embraces ecological principles at the level of individuals across any and all lineages of life on our planet”, notes Prof. Mark E. Hauber, also an editor-in-chief. 

“This new journal will promote nothing less than a paradigm shift in ecological thinking from averaging approaches to a science focused on the fundamental agents of change, i.e. individual organisms. Systematically recognising the importance of individual variation in ecological systems will transform our fundamental understanding of how biodiversity and its components emerge from individual responses and interactions, and how the emerging levels of organisation will respond to changing environments,” said Prof Florian Jeltsch from the editorial team.  

IBE joins a number of open-access ecology journals published by Pensoft.For more information on the journal’s focus and scope and guidelines to authors, visit IBE’s website and follow it on Facebook and X.

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FAIRer knowledge about biodiversity with AI-friendly nanopublications at Biodiversity Data Journal

Earlier this year, in a pilot project, the teams of high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft released a novel workflow to publicly share and future-proof scientific findings by means of nanopublications.

Nanopublications complement human-created narratives of scientific knowledge with elementary, machine-actionable, simple and straightforward scientific statements that prompt sharing, finding, accessibility, citability and interoperability. By making it easier to trace individual findings back to their origin and/or follow-up updates, it also helps to better understand the provenance of biodiversity data.

These semantic statements expressed in community-agreed terms, openly available through links to controlled vocabularies, ontologies and standards, are not only freely accessible to everyone in both human-readable and machine-actionable formats, but also easy-to-digest for computer algorithms and AI-powered assistants.

Now, the collaborators – also partly supported by the Horizon 2020-funded project BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) – have built up on a pilot workflow already launched in the Biodiversity Data Journal – to create a specialised nanopublication solution to address the need for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data in the biodiversity science domain. 

In their studies, researchers need to use and refer to extensive and diverse biodiversity data at once, e.g. information about groups of organisms and their classification, collections, authors and genetic sequences. However, those would normally be scattered across a vast number of articles or belong to dissociated databases. This is a major and widely recognised issue in biodiversity science, which is currently stagnating progress not only in building up the world’s knowledge about the natural world around us, but also impeding biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.

Using the newly released nanopublication workflow, biodiversity researchers can now incorporate nanopublications within their manuscripts to future-proof their most important assertions on biological taxa and organisms or statements about associations of taxa or organisms and their environments. 

In addition, the authors can also create standalone nanopublications that comment or derive from already existing research journals published in an academic journal or another citable source (e.g. expert database), regardless of the author of the source. 

“With the nanopublication format, authors make sure that key scientific statements – the ones underpinning their research work – are efficiently communicated in a machine-actionable and FAIR manner. Thus, their contributions to science become future-proof for a reality driven by AI technology,”

explains Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft.

“Biodiversity is the ideal field for this pilot exploring the next steps in scientific publishing. Biodiversity and its neighbouring fields have produced a remarkable number of high-quality resources, such as controlled vocabularies and databases, which we can now build upon. Moreover, many Biodiversity researchers have shown to be very open to such new methods and are enthusiastic about working together to build a more powerful ecosystem for scientific knowledge sharing, and we share their enthusiasm,”

says Tobias Kuhn, CTO and co-founder of Knowledge Pixels. 

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You can find more about the nanopublication workflow and its advantages to biodiversity scientists on the Pensoft blog and the Biodiversity Data Journal website.

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Second economics journal by Moscow State University migrates to ARPHA Platform

Two years ago the publishing platform, developed by the scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft, welcomed Moscow State University’s journal Population and Economics. Now, ARPHA announces the transfer of a second academic title published by the institution’s Faculty of Economics. The peer-reviewed, open-access BRICS Journal of Economics covers key economic issues of middle-income developing countries, primarily BRICS countries. 

BRICS Journal of Economics is a fairly new scientific outlet launched in 2020 with the aim to provide a better understanding of the specifics of the BRICS countries (China, Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa), as well as a broader knowledge about the prospects emerging in those constantly growing economies. It publishes four issues per year, where all articles are submitted in English and undergo double-blind peer review. Thanks to sponsorship available from one of the leading universal banks of Russia: VTB Bank, it runs a Diamond Open Access policy, where neither reading, nor publishing incurs any costs to readers and authors.

With its move to ARPHA, BRICS Journal of Economics is to utilise the whole package of ARPHA Platform’s signature services, including a fast-track, end-to-end publishing module, designed to appeal to readers, authors, reviewers and editors alike. 

Soon, the journal will relaunch on its brand new ARPHA-powered website, where authors, editors and reviewers will find and track the progress of all of their tasks, files and correspondence, in addition to the infrastructure needed to complete every step along the editorial process. Put simply, once submitted, a manuscript has no need to leave the online, collaborative-friendly platform all the way to its publication, dissemination and archiving.

On their part, the readers of BRICS Journal of Economics will enjoy the publications in a conventional PDF format that allows easier storage, as well as semantically enriched HTML. The latter ensures a complete and mobile-friendly reading experience by relying on easier navigation and plenty of related additional linked information within the article’s text. Meanwhile, the third utilised format: the machine-readable JATS XML will make the publications much more visible and findable to both humans searching on the Internet and algorithms mining the web. 

Amongst the other advantages provided by the journal is a full suite of various metrics designed to track the usage of both articles and sub-article elements, such as figures and tables, at any time.

“We are delighted to extend our collaboration with the Moscow State University’s Faculty of Economics by taking care after the technological advancement of BRICS Journal of Economics. This particular journal is undoubtedly serving a fantastic role in the community by filling a niche in the study of Economics, and it is an honour for us at ARPHA and Pensoft to aid its reach to the international public,” 

says Prof. Dr Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at ARPHA and Pensoft.

Additional information:

About Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University:

Founded in 1941, the Faculty of Economics continues the centuries-old tradition of economic education in Russia, being one of the leading university-level centres in the field of Economics.

The faculty combines fundamental education and professional training in order to develop its students’ analytical skills and creative thinking, thereby helping its graduates to adapt quickly and successfully to the requirements of any job in the field of economics.

About Lomonosov Moscow State University:

Founded in 1755 by Russian polymath, scientist and writer Mikhail Lomonosov, the university is currently the highest-ranking Russian educational institution, according to the 2018 QS World University Rankings. It is also considered to be the most prestigious university in the former Soviet Union.

Every year Moscow University enrolls about 4 000 international students and postgraduates from all over the world.

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The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society revamped on ARPHA Platform

The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society, the oldest and most representative academic outlet of the Bulgarian Geographical Society, now boasts an improved publishing infrastructure after moving to the technologically advanced ARPHA Platform and signing with scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.

The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society is an international scientific journal dedicated to all fields of geography and interrelated fields of earth, ecological, social, economic and geoinformation sciences. It has a global geographical scope with a focus on Southeastern Europe and the Balkans, and its first issue dates back to 1933.

Having already acquired its own glossy and user-friendly website provided by ARPHA, the journal also takes advantage of the platform’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving.

With features such as machine-readable XML format for papers, automated data export to aggregators, automated email notifications and reminders, and web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, the easy-to-use, open-access platform ensures that published research is easy to discover, access, cite and reuse by both humans and machines all over the world. The journal is now indexed in the likes of Crossref, Google Scholar, OpenCitations, Publons and Scibey, and archived in CLOCKSS, Portico and Zenodo.

The very first publications for 2021 (vol. 44) are out now. An opening editorial presents the background, the new mission and perspectives of the journal. A paper, authored by Stanley D. Brunn, communicates the mapping morality and its visible and invisible geographies. The rest of the issue’s articles will be published upon approval, following a “flow publishing” schedule.

“In the autumn of 2020, the editorial team and the executive committee of the Bulgarian Geographical Society agreed upon a new mission of the journal. It aims to respond and to adapt to the newest developments in scholarly publishing by providing a platform for high quality and innovative papers in all fields of geography and interrelated fields of earth, ecological, social, economic, and geoinformation sciences. The geographical scope of the journal will cover the entire world with special attention to Southeastern Europe and the Balkans,”

comment the journal’s editors.

“In these days of continuous speeding up of paces of work and life, the idea of facilitating the sharing of existing knowledge in order to create synergies, new knowledge, and innovation is more than timely and our journal can join the efforts to achieve these goals. That is why we are excited by the launch of JBGS on the ARPHA platform – a next-generation publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring and reviewing to publishing and dissemination.”

This partnership is the latest addition to Pensoft’s track record of collaboration with scientific societies. Earlier this year, three of Senckenberg Nature Research Society‘s journals – Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny, Vertebrate Zoology and Geologica Saxonica, transitioned to ARPHA’s platform.

Front covers of selected journal issues across different periods (1933 – 2021).

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Follow the Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society on Facebook and Twitter.

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New open-access journal Metabarcoding & Metagenomics joins the lines of ARPHA and Pensoft

A new innovative open-access academic journal Metabarcoding and Metagenomics (MBMG) is launched to welcome novel papers from both basic and applied aspects.

Focusing on genetic approaches to study biodiversity across all ecosystems, MBMG covers a considerably large scope of research including environmental, microbial and applied metabarcoding and metagenomics (especially DNA-based bioassessment and -monitoring, quarantine, nature conservation, species invasions, eDNA surveillance), as well as associated topics, such as molecular ecology, DNA-based species delimitation and identification, and other emerging related fields. Submissions of bioinformatic approaches to MBMG (algorithms, software) are also encouraged.

Featuring novel article formats and data publishing workflows, MBMG is to reflect the rapid growth in the use of metabarcoding and metagenomics in life and environmental sciences.

Issued via ARPHA – the first ever publishing platform to support manuscripts all the way from authoring to peer review to publication and dissemination, designed by the academic publisher and technology provider Pensoft, the new journal is to host a wide range of outcomes from across the research cycle, including data, models, methods, workflows, software, perspectives, opinions, implementation strategies, as well as conventional research articles.

While the above-mentioned publication types are already available in other journals published on the ARPHA platform, such as Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), Biodiversity Data Journal and One Ecosystem, MBMG provides five extra domain-specific article types, namely: Emerging Technique, Applied Study, DNA Barcode Release, Primer Validation and Probe Validation.

The journal’s articles are to be available in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML) and full of semantic enhancements for better human- and machine-readability and discoverability. The XML-based workflow also ensures that content and data are available for extraction, indexing and re-use immediately after publication.

With Pensoft standing for transparent, reproducible and open science, the authors at MBMG are strongly encouraged to make all data publicly available either within the publication itself, or to link to external repositories. In their turn, the peer reviewers are also suggested to provide public access to their reviews and identities.

In time for the launch, MBMG has already gathered a team of experienced and renowned scientists from across the globe together on its editorial and advisory board.

“I am pleased to introduce the Metabarcoding and Metagenomics journal to the family of Pensoft,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and Managing Director at Pensoft. “With its exhaustive scope and advanced services and concept, I believe it fills fantastically a niche in our strong portfolio of mostly biodiversity- and ecology-themed journals.”

“Metabarcoding and metagenomics approaches are rapidly progressing and revolutionise research and its application alike,” Chief Editor Prof. Florian Leese states. “With the MBMG journal we provide an ideal platform to respond to this rapidly growing field, nucleate the emerging knowledge and stimulate further development.”

The first batch of research papers published in MBMG are now available on their new website.

“MBMG not only complements the range of journals in the field of molecular environmental life sciences, but also stands out as a novel outlet providing several unique features designed to help researchers to prepare for, and professionally deal with, the massive “deluge” of data,” reads the Editorial.

To celebrate the launch, MBMG starts with a tempting offer to potential authors: publishing will be completely free of charge during the beginning stages of the journal.

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New open access journal Rethinking Ecology publishes novel ideas

Needless to say, it is through sharing new ideas and hypotheses that critical issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss can be addressed. However, few scientists are currently in a position to do so, because publishing bold ideas in peer-reviewed journals is very difficult, especially for those who are not world-renowned scientists in their field. At the same time, scientists sharing novel ideas that have not been published yet, carry the risk of being ‘scooped’. This is probably a scientist’s worst nightmare: seeing someone else publish the idea they have been working on. In this context, many innovative ideas are kept secret and it can take years before they are made available to the scientific community.

This is the niche that the novel open access peer-reviewed journal Rethinking Ecology aims to fill by providing a platform for forward thinking and publication of novel ideas in all aspects of ecology, evolution and environmental science.

Adding to its innovative nature, Rethinking Ecology joins the modern technologically advanced Pensoft journals published on next-generation platform ARPHA (abbreviation standing for Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving). Not only is the platform to provide fast-track and convenient publishing for the authors, reviewers and editors in Rethinking Ecology, as it takes care of a manuscript through all stages from authoring and reviewing to dissemination and archiving, but it is user-friendly to the readers as well, who enjoy publications in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML) and full of semantic enhancements.

The innovative journal aims to encourage all scientists, regardless of their seniority, publication track record, gender, or country of origin, to publish perspective papers, so that they are put in the open for peers to discuss and build on, while credit is given where credit is due. Publishing these ideas early also draws attention from the scientific community, potential collaborators and potential funders. To further avoid potential bias, Rethinking Ecology implements double-blind peer review, with the journal supporting the notion that it is the content of a manuscript that matters. Moreover, reviewers will not be asked for a formal recommendation. Instead, they will comment and evaluate the work against a set of specific questions. Thus, each paper ends up with a score on Novelty, Feasibility, Scholarship and Literacy, so that only perspective papers with an emphasis on novel hypotheses and bold ideas are accepted for publication.

Another innovative feature applied in the new journal is an Author Contribution Index (ACI), meaning that each publication will include a pie chart pointing to the contribution of each of the authors, estimated in percentage. This is the editors’ answer to the so-called ‘guest authorship’ (i.e. inclusion of authors who did not significantly contribute to the work).

logoIt is no coincidence that Rethinking Ecology has a spiral-shaped unfurling fern leaf as a logo. Called Koru in the language of the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand – Māori, it symbolises novelty, new life and new beginning, as well as perpetual movement.

“Each publication in Rethinking Ecology can be seen as the beginning of life for a new idea and its metaphorical unfurling as it reaches out to the scientific community,” explain the journal editors in their very first Editorial at Rethinking Ecology.

“We see Rethinking Ecology as an incubator for novel ideas, and a catalyst for new thinking,” says the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Dr Stephane Boyer, Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand.

“In a world where scientific publications are increasingly open source and immediately available, it makes no sense to keep our most innovative ideas hidden from the world for years while we secretly test them,” he elaborates. “Bold ideas and new hypotheses need to be shared, they may or may not turn into world-changing paradigm shifts, but they all have the potential to contribute to new thinking.”

“I am pleased to welcome a groundbreaking journal such as Rethinking Ecology to the Pensoft family, which has already built a nice and extensive portfolio of innovations in scholarly publishing,” says Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Seeing genuine ideas and hypotheses yet to be tested, and possibly, yet to revolutionise the ecological science is certainly a thing worthy of eager anticipation.”

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About ARPHA:

ARPHA is the first end-to-end journal publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring through submission, peer review, publication and dissemination. With ARPHA, journals and publishers enjoy a complete set of services, which enable tailored, technologically advanced publishing solutions. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models to choose from.