Category: Journals News

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The International Mycological Association partners with Pensoft to move prestigious IMA Fungus to the ARPHA platform

IMA Fungus journal cover mockup.

The International Mycological Association (IMA) has partnered with Pensoft to transition its flagship journal IMA Fungus to the ARPHA publishing platform after the open-access scientific publisher and technology provider won the bid by the IMA’s Executive Committee, following the expiration of their contract with BioMed Central (BMC, part of Springer-Nature). Already accepting manuscripts on its new website, the first publications in IMA Fungus since the transfer are expected in January 2025.

The move comes in a series of milestones for the prestigious journal in 2024, which also saw the appointment of its new Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, who has recently started his presidency at the IMA Council.

Committed to advancing mycological research and ensuring free access to high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific content, while representing the interest of mycology and mycologists worldwide, IMA’s Executive Board is confident that the new collaboration will further improve and streamline the publication process at IMA Fungus, and build up on its reputation in the field.

ARPHA platform’s intuitive and integrated end-to-end publishing workflow is designed to simplify the publication process for authors, reviewers, and editors. From submission to publication, automated full-text export to scientific databases and permanent hosting, all steps will be consolidated within a single, user-friendly interface, resulting in faster review cycles and more efficient communication between all parties involved. In addition to its signature publishing technology, Pensoft is providing IMA Fungus with various human-provided services, including help desk, design, science communication, marketing and journal development support. 

Founded in 2010 at the 9th International Mycological Congress in Edinburgh, IMA Fungus was first published by the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (an institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, now Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute) until its move to BMC in 2018. Keeping up with tradition, the transfer of IMA Fungus to Pensoft and ARPHA was publicly announced at this year’s 12th  International Mycological Congress in Maastricht.

Today, IMA Fungus boasts an impressive Scopus CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor, standing at 11.0 and 5.2 respectively. It ranks 6th in the Mycology category on Web of Science.

Since day one, IMA Fungus has been mandated as the only journal in which formal proposals relating to the rules on the naming of fungi or protected lists of names are to be published under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants. Its scope covers all areas of mycology of interest to the wider mycological community, from basic to applied research.

“I am happy that we could get some of the most experienced editors to join us to the new publisher. Likewise, I am glad that many proficient young scientists from around the world, including most of the recent winners of the IMA Young Mycologist Award, joined our interdisciplinary editor panel.”

Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler, commenting on the latest news about IMA Fungus.

“It is a great honour to welcome IMA Fungus to the ARPHA family. We look forward to working with the International Mycological Association and helping to further advance their prestigious journal.”

Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, Pensoft’s founder and CEO.

To learn more about IMA Fungus or submit your manuscript, visit the journal’s newly launched website. Previous issues of the journal are available here.

To stay up-to-date with its new publication, sign up for its Email Alert newsletter from the journal’s homepage, and follow it on X and Facebook.  

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About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent, open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider, best known for its 40+ biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, One Ecosystem and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Ever since becoming the first publisher to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a scientific article in the field of biodiversity in 2010, Pensoft has been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.

About ARPHA:

ARPHA is a full-featured, open-access publishing platform for scholarly journals, books, data and conference outputs, developed by the scientific publisher and technology developer Pensoft. Clients are provided with a software solution as well as a range of relevant human-provided services. Standing for Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, ARPHA offers a wide range of tailorable services to publishers, societies, university presses, conference organisers and other academic institutions to provide them with a full-featured and all-rounded publishing experience, thereby saving them the extra efforts and unnecessary hassle of dealing with multiple vendors and service providers.

About the International Mycological Association:

The International Mycological Association, founded in 1971, represents the interests of over 30,000 mycologists worldwide. It is a non-for-profit organisation, the purpose of which is the encouragement of mycology in all its branches. This implies that the IMA should strive to promote mycology in its widest sense.

IMA Fungus is the flagship journal of the International Mycological Association. Papers on any aspect of mycology are considered, and published on-line with final pagination after proofs are corrected; taxonomic novelties are then effectively and validly published under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. The journal strongly supports good practice policies, and requires voucher specimens or cultures to be deposited in a public collection with an online database, DNA sequences in GenBank, alignments in TreeBASE, and validating information on new scientific names, including typifications, to be accessioned in MycoBank. 

MycoBank is the online repository and nomenclatural registry provided in collaboration between the International Mycological Association and the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute. It provides a free service to the mycological and scientific society by databasing mycological nomenclatural novelties (new names and combinations) and associated data, such as descriptions, illustrations and DNA barcodes. Nomenclatural novelties are each allocated a unique MycoBank number to be cited in the publication where the nomenclatural novelty is introduced, to conform with the requirements of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants.

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Metabarcoding & Metagenomics selected for inclusion in the Web of Science

Metabarcoding & Metagenomics (MBMG) has been approved for inclusion in Clarivate’s Web of Science, one of the most renowned citation databases that indexes the world’s leading scholarly journals. This recognition underscores the journal’s growing influence in its field, and reflects its commitment to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed research.

Since its launch in September 2017, the journal has been at the forefront of publishing papers on metabarcoding and metagenomics for both basic and applied studies. At the time of its inauguration it was seen as a particularly forward-looking and niche scholarly outlet because it was devised to address the need for an innovative journal in the rapidly developing fields of DNA-based environmental research, biodiversity monitoring and nature conservation. Going forward, MBMG’s inclusion in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) at Web of Science will further enhance the visibility and accessibility of existing and future research.

Now that it has completed the Web of Science’s rigorous quality and integrity assessment, MBMG may receive its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as early as 2025. This is a testament to the dedication of the authors, reviewers, and editorial board members who have contributed to the journal’s success.

MBMG is indexed and archived in more than 60 databases, including Scopus, DOAJ, ResearchGate, Library of Congress, British Library, Baidu Scholar, CNKI, EBSCO, Unpaywall, CLOCKSS and Zenodo.

In June 2024, the journal received a Scopus CiteScore of 5.4, placing it in Q1 in five categories: Animal Science and Zoology; Insect Science; Plant Science; Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Systematics; and Nature and Landscape Conservation.

This inclusion in the Web of Science marks a new chapter in the journal’s mission to facilitate the production and dissemination of important research.

“The quality of research and the perception by the community our MBMG staff supports matter most. Being officially listed in Web of Science and having a Journal Impact Factor are criteria of high importance to many of our authors. Therefore, I‘m very happy about this new development.”

Prof. Dr. Florian Leese, Editor-in-Chief of MBMG and Full Professor in Aquatic Ecosystem Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

“This represents a significant milestone in the growth of MBMG and will likely make it an even more attractive choice for researchers in this field.”  

Dr. Dirk Steinke, Deputy Editor-in-Chief at MBMG and Associate Director at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, Canada. 

“From the very beginning, we were convinced that this niche is of high relevance and will be rapidly expanding. The inclusion of MBMG in the Web of Science will be of particular importance for our (young) authors, who are too often evaluated by IF-based criteria. At the same time, MBMG hopefully will face a further growing number of submissions.”

Dr Alexander M. Weigand, Liaison editor at MBMG and Zoology Curator at the National Museum of Natural History Luxembourg.

Follow Metabarcoding & Metagenomics on X and Facebook.

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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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New Diamond OA journal Natural History Collections and Museomics launches on ARPHA Platform

Mockup of a Natural History Collections and Museomics journal besides a collection of pinned butterflies.

Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM), a brand-new Diamond Open Access journal, has launched on ARPHA platform. 

The journal aims to serve as a leading platform for scholarly research, discussion, and innovation in the field of natural history collections worldwide and will be published by Pensoft Publishers. 

By promoting the exchange of knowledge between museum professionals, researchers, educators, and enthusiasts, the publication aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of natural history and its significance in society. 

A Pensoft conference stand with a poster promoting the Natural History Collections and Museomics journal.
Natural History Collections and Museomics promoted by Pensoft at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology in Kyoto, Japan.

Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM) encourages interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across fields such as taxonomy, conservation, education, ethics, and museum studies. The editorial team welcomes original research articles, reviews, case studies, methods, letters and perspectives addressing a wide range of topics related to natural history institutions and collections. 

The journal is supported by CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), Europe’s leading voice for taxonomy and systematic biology. The support of this European network of scientific institutions ensures a robust and collaborative foundation for the journal’s academic endeavours.

By utilising a Diamond Open Access model, the journal allows free access to published content without any fees for authors or readers. This approach ensures that important research can reach the widest possible audience, promoting inclusivity and global collaboration in the field.

A strong Editorial Board is already in place, co-chaired by two distinguished scholars in the field. 

Dr Franco Andreone: Serving as the zoology curator at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin, Italy, Dr Andreone is a renowned herpetologist with a profound impact on amphibian taxonomy, roles of natural history museums and conservation, particularly in Italy and Madagascar. His experience as a former Chair of the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group – Madagascar and his current role as a special advisor underscore his life-long dedication to preserving biodiversity.

Prof Shuqiang Li: A prominent Chinese arachnologist,  Prof Li brings his vast expertise in zoological systematics to the journal. Among many accomplishments, he led the construction of 29 natural history museums for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of which is an 8,800 square metre collection building to preserve more than 10 million specimens and another a 6,600 square metre public museum in the Zoological Institute in Beijing. As leading taxonomist and the Editor-in-Chief of Zoological Systematics, Professor Li has described more than 2,000 new species. His work on how Tethyan changes shaped diversification is most notable. His research has also revealed the origin of spider webs based multi-omics analyses.

The Board expects the team of subject (associate) editors to soon expand further, as they have been actively recruiting colleagues from diverse professional and geographical backgrounds. Experts in fields within the scope of the new journal are also invited to apply to join the NHCM team as either editors or reviewers. Conveniently, the respective application forms are made accessible from the journal website’s homepage.

“The journal Natural History Collections and Museomics will serve as a perfect forum and place to publish cutting-edge research.

“Natural history collections are gargantuan resources and tools to discover and preserve global diversity. We need to treat them as immense treasures to discover and describe new species and understand Earth’s marvels.”

Dr Franco Andreone and Prof Shuqiang Li, Editors-in-Chief.

“We are thrilled to launch Natural History Collections and Museomics on the ARPHA Platform. The importance of natural history collections cannot be overstated and we look forward to publishing valuable research to a wide audience.”

Prof Dr Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers.

Submissions to the journal are now open. Researchers, scholars, and practitioners are invited to contribute articles to Natural History Collections and Museomics. 

For more information and submission guidelines, please visit the Natural History Collections and Museomics website.

You can also follow the journal on X and Facebook.

About ARPHA Platform:

ARPHA is a full-featured, end-to-end publishing platform for journals, books, conference materials and preprints. ARPHA offers flexible operating and business models, and a wide-range of automated and human-provided services. The ARPHA team places a special focus on its scholarly communication solutions designed to leverage the visibility and outreach of academic output, while promoting inclusivity and engagement.

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomics and many others. Over the past 30 years, Pensoft has built a reputation for its innovations in the field, after launching ZooKeys: the very first digital-first scientific journal in zoology and the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a biodiversity article. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability. 

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Innovations in Agriculture moves to the ARPHA Platform

A green scientific journal next to crops being watered by a robotic arm.

Innovations in Agriculture, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing agricultural research, has partnered with Pensoft to transition to the ARPHA publishing platform.  This move will enhance the journal’s publishing workflow, content visibility, and elevate the impact of their research within the global agricultural community.

Established in 1970, Innovations in Agriculture is committed to publishing high-quality research that addresses the critical challenges and opportunities in modern agriculture. The journal covers a wide range of topics, including agricultural technology, sustainable farming practices, crop and livestock management, and policy implications.

All the journal’s legacy papers have been successfully migrated to the ARPHA platform, and the first new issue has been published on its new ARPHA-powered website, complete with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) tags on individual articles.

Research articles showcasing SDG tags.

By utilising ARPHA’s white-label solution, Innovations in Agriculture will enjoy several key benefits, including a streamlined submission and review process, automated workflows, advanced authoring tools, and robust archiving and indexing.

During the journal’s launching phase, authors may benefit from a yearly quota covering the free publication of 25 standard articles (up to 20 published pages).

“We are thrilled to welcome Innovations in Agriculture to ARPHA’s family of next-generation scientific journals. ARPHA’s publishing solutions will help Innovations in Agriculture thrive and continue disseminating important research.”

said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.

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For more information, visit the Innovations in Agriculture website.

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First Journal Impact Factor for One Ecosystem

For the first time, the Journal Citation Reports™ – released by Clarivate in late June 2024 – features the open-access scientific journal One Ecosystem. The inaugural Journal Impact Factor for One Ecosystem stands at 1.8.

The 2024 report reflects how many times content published in a particular journal in 2021 and 2022 was cited in the last complete year: 2023. Then, this total count is divided by the number of “citable” (i.e. research and review) articles to estimate the JIF for 2023.

The news comes shortly after the journal specialised in ecology and sustainability data received a Scopus CiteScore of 4.6. In comparison to Clarivate and the Journal Impact Factor, Scopus uses data from its own database and calculates its CiteScore based on publications and citations from the last four complete years.

One Ecosystem was launched in 2016 by open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft in collaboration with Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard (Head of the Physical Geography & Landscape Ecology section at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany), and Deputy Editors-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Davide Geneletti (Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Italy) and Dr. Joachim Maes, (Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission). Since the beginning it has been associated with and endorsed by the global Ecosystem Services Partnership.

Amongst the unique features of the journal are the collaborative writing and review environment integrated within the manuscript submission workflow to allow for heavily automated structured data import; semantically enriched publications; and field-specific article formats, such as Ecosystem Service Mapping; Ecosystem Service Models; Ecosystem Accounting Table; Monitoring Schema.

“Since day one, One Ecosystem has been widely praised in the community for its novel and data-driven approach to ecology and sustainability science, coupled with a straight-forward and low-cost open-access scholarly publishing strategy for any researcher in the world. Now, the recognition by Web of Science and Scopus provides the journal with further proof of its top quality and research integrity that – I expect – will attract even more researchers in the field to submit their work to the journal”  

says Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Burkhard.

Content published in One Ecosystem can be found in over 60 leading academic indexing databases, including Scopus, Research Gate, DOAJ, Cabell’s Directory, CABI, ERIH PLUS, CNKI, Unpaywall and OpenAIRE. It is also archived in CLOCKSS, Zenodo, Portico and Zendy.

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Visit the One Ecosystem journal website at: https://oneecosystem.pensoft.net.

You can also follow One Ecosystem on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

One Ecosystem selected for inclusion in the Web of Science
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The International Biogeography Society relaunches flagship journal Frontiers of Biogeography on ARPHA Platform

The International Biogeography Society (TIBS) has relaunched its flagship open-access scientific journal, Frontiers of Biogeography (FoB), on the ARPHA platform, where it will be co-published with Pensoft Publishers.

This collaboration underscores the society’s commitment to maintaining high-quality, high-visibility and low-cost open-access publishing for the biogeographical community.

“This switch of our journal to a cutting-edge platform, and its committed team of editors, should continue to raise the journal’s visibility and impact,”

comments Prof. Dr. Susanne Renner, TIBS President.

Established by TIBS in 2009, Frontiers of Biogeography serves as an independent forum for research dissemination, and publishes studies on all geographical variations of life at all levels of organisation. The journal adheres to rigorous academic standards, reflecting the mission of TIBS to promote and advance public understanding of biogeographical sciences. 

The journal’s editorial leadership includes Prof. Robert J. Whittaker (University of Oxford, United Kingdom), Dr. Janet Franklin (San Diego State University, USA) and Prof. Mark J. Costello (Nord University, Norway), all esteemed figures in the field.

Frontiers of Biogeography was launched on the ARPHA Platform on the 1st of July 2024. The platform is now open for new submissions and offers a robust review and publication process. Articles and supplementary materials published on ARPHA will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), ensuring wide accessibility and reuse. All previously published issues on the e-Scholarship platform will remain freely accessible, ensuring the continuity of knowledge dissemination.

Frontiers of Biogeography has recently been selected for inclusion in the Web of Science™. Beginning with volume 14(1), articles will be indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index, Zoological Record, Biological Abstracts, and BIOSIS Previews, significantly enhancing the journal’s visibility.

Furthermore, the journal’s latest Scopus CiteScore of 4.3 places it in the Q1 category for Ecology and Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Systematics, and elevates it from Q3 to Q2 in the Global and Planetary Change category.

“I am looking forward to working with the new platform and to the start of a new partnership with our colleagues at Pensoft Publishers. This arrangement underlines the commitment of The International Biogeography Society to the growth and success of Frontiers of Biogeography as a service to our members and the broader scientific community,”

stated Prof. Dr. Robert J. Whittaker, Editor-in-Chief.

“In these days of sometimes exorbitant costs to pay publication charges by some of the big publishers, TIBS and Pensoft are joining forces to make it possible for all authors to be able to publish their work at reasonable costs while maintaining the high scholarly standards of peer-review and editorial management which are the foundation of good science,”

added Prof. Dr. Mark J. Costello, Co-Editor-in-Chief.

“We are excited to welcome Frontiers of Biogeography to the ARPHA Platform and look forward to a successful, open-access future. This partnership aligns with our mission to support scientific research through innovative publishing solutions,”

said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers.

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Visit the Frontiers of Biogeography’s new website at https://biogeography.pensoft.net/. Use the Email alert field on the homepage to follow the latest publications, news, and highlights from Frontiers of Biogeography.

You can also follow the journal on X (formerly Twitter) at @newbiogeo.

Keep up to date with the latest from TIBS by following them on X (@Biogeography) and joining the society’s Facebook group.

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Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research starts publishing on ARPHA Platform

The Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research (JBCR), the peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary scientific journal of Medical University Pleven, has moved to Pensoft’s ARPHA platform. Enjoying an improved publishing infrastructure, the journal has already published its first issue after the move on its new ARPHA-powered website.

Open to scientists from all fields of medicine and related areas, JBCR welcomes interdisciplinary scientific results and articles presenting diverse pathologies from various clinical perspectives. It publishes reviews, original articles, and communications relevant to biomedical, clinical, and public health, medical education, and case reports.

Published since 2008, JBCR is a diamond open-access journal, meaning it requires no article submission charges, and is free to both authors and readers. The journal currently publishes two issues per year.

Opting for ARPHA’s white-label solution, JBCR joins a number of academic journals in medicine already hosted on the ARPHA platform, such as Folia Medica and Pharmacia. It will take advantage of ARPHA’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. By leveraging the innovative platform, JBCR enhances the visibility and impact of the published research, providing a better experience for its authors, readers, and editors.

“We are excited to welcome the Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research to ARPHA’s family of next-generation scientific journals,” said Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft, the company behind the ARPHA platform. “With the help of ARPHA’s publishing solutions, JBCR can ensure efficient, high-quality dissemination of important medical research.”

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Vegetation Classification and Survey awaits first Journal Impact Factor

Only four years after the inaugural editorial by Prof Dr Florian Jansen, Dr Idoia Biurrun, Prof Dr Jürgen Dengler and Dr Wolfgang Willner that officialised the third and still youngest scientific journal of the International Association of Vegetation Science (IAVS), the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal successfully completed the rigorous quality and integrity assessment at Web of Science (WoS).

Late May 2024 saw the whole content ever published in VCS added to the Core Collection of the renowned academic platform, further boosting its discoverability, accessibility and reliability to researchers and other stakeholders alike, confirms the Indexing team of Pensoft and the ARPHA scholarly publishing platform.

“Many thanks to IAVS as owner and Pensoft as publisher, who made this success story possible. However, most of all, this early inclusion into the Web of Science Core Edition is due to the good articles of our authors and the great volunteer service our Associate Editors, Guest Editors, Linguistic Editors, Editorial Review Board members, and other reviewers did and do for VCS,”

the Chief Editors comment on the latest success.

The news means that VCS is soon to receive its very first Journal Impact Factor (JIF): allegedly the most popular and sought after journal-level metric, which annually releases the citation (or “impact”) rate of a given scholarly journal over the last period. By the end of next month, for example, we will know how different journals indexed by WoS have performed compared to each other, based on the number of citations received in 2023 (from other journals indexed by WoS) for papers published in 2021 and 2022 combined.

In 2022, VCS and its all-time publications were also featured by the largest and similarly acclaimed scientific database: Scopus, thus receiving its very first Scopus CiteScore* last June. At 2.0, the result instantly gave a promise of the widely appreciated content published in the journal.

In an editorial, published in the beginning of 2024, the Chief Editors assessed the performance of the journal and analysed the available data from Scopus to predict the citation rates for the journal in the next few years. There, the team also compared the journal’s latest performance with similar journals, including the other two journals owned by the IAVS (i.e. Applied Vegetation Science and Journal of Vegetation Science). Given that as of May 2024 the Scopus CiteScoreTracker for VCS reads 2.5, their optimistic forecasts seem rather realistic.

“The VCS articles of 2023 were on average even better cited than those in Applied Vegetation Science of the same year and had reached about the same level as Journal of Vegetation Science and Biodiversity and Conservation,”

they concluded.

In a recent post, published on the IAVS blog, on behalf of the four VCS Chief Editors, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler further comments on the latest achievements of the journal, while also highlighting particularly valued recent publications.

The team also uses the occasion to invite experts in the field of vegetation science to submit their manuscripts in 2024 to make use of the generous financial support by the IAVS. Given the increasing interest in VCS, the journal also invites additional linguistic editors, as well as reviewers who wish to join the Editorial Review Board.

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Keep yourself updated with news from Vegetation Classification and Survey on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. You can also follow IAVS on X and join the Association’s public group on Facebook. 

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*Note that the Scopus database features a different selection of scientific journals compared to Web of Science to estimate citation metrics. The indexers are also using different formulae, where the former looks into citations made in the last two complete years for eligible papers published in the same years.

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About Vegetation Classification and Survey:

Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) is an international, peer-reviewed, online journal on plant community ecology published on behalf of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). It is devoted to vegetation survey and classification at any organisational and spatial scale and without restriction to certain methodological approaches.

The scope of VCS is focused on vegetation typologies and vegetation classification systems, their methodological foundation, their development and their application. The journal publishes original papers that develop new typologies as well as applied studies that use such typologies, for example, in vegetation mapping, ecosystem modelling, nature conservation, land use management, or monitoring. Particularly encouraged are methodological studies that design and compare tools for vegetation classification and mapping, such as algorithms, databases and nomenclatural principles, or are dealing with the conceptual and theoretical bases of vegetation survey and classification. 

VCS also includes two permanent collections (or sections): “Ecoinformatics” and “Phytosociological Nomenclature”. 

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomics and many others. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.

About ARPHA Platform:

Pensoft publishes its journals on its self-developed ARPHA publishing platform: an end-to-end, narrative- and data-integrated publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring to reviewing, publishing and dissemination. ARPHA provides accomplished and streamlined production workflows that can be heavily customised by client journals not necessarily linked to Pensoft as a publisher, since ARPHA is specially targeted at learned societies, research institutions and university presses. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models. Alongside its elaborate and highly automated publishing tools and services, ARPHA provides a range of human-provided services, such as science communication and assistance in indexation at databases like Web of Science and Scopus, to provide a complete full-featured publishing solution package.

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ARPHA expands client journal network to the Middle East

The Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture (EJFA), a peer-reviewed scholarly outlet in agricultural and food sciences by the College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), has now become the first scientific journal from the Middle East to take advantage of the end-to-end scholarly publishing platform ARPHA and its diverse range of services.

Launched in 1989 to cover the areas of agriculture and food science, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, the open-access scientific journal has already begun publishing its 2024 content on its new ARPHA-powered website. The move comes as a result of a new partnership signed between the United Arab Emirates University and Pensoft: the scholarly publisher and technology innovator.

Since 2013, EJFA is also indexed by Web of Science. Its latest Journal Impact Factor is 1.1, while its Scopus CiteScore reads 1.9.

Launched in 2013, ARPHA is Pensoft’s in-house publishing platform, initially developed by the publisher as an all-round solution for its own journal portfolio. In 2016, ARPHA became available as a white-label solution, thereby allowing client journals to retain their owners as exclusive publishers, and keep their identities intact.

The move to ARPHA ensures a seamless, end-to-end publishing solution for EJFA that encompasses all stages from manuscript submission to article publication, indexation, dissemination, and 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 EJFA.

“Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities.”

Abdul Jaleel, Editor-in-Chief of EJFA

EJFA publishes original research articles, review papers and short communications. It welcomes studies from a wide spectrum of agriculture and food disciplines, including sustainable agriculture systems, agricultural biotechnology, environmental impacts, food safety, and food engineering. 

Submissions to EJFA are subject to single-blind peer review. The journal operates a continuous publication model, which means that once accepted, papers go online as soon as they are typeset and ready for publication.

Due to ARPHA Platform’s technologically advanced and automated dissemination, indexing and archiving workflows, as well as its platform-level integrations with >60 leading databases, content published in EJFA is rapidly exported to dozens of platforms and widely used academic search portals, thereby becoming ever easier to discover, access, reuse and cite by audiences from all over the world.

EJFA has already published its first articles since the move. The journal’s backlist content all the way to the inaugural 1989 journal volume can be accessed from a link on the journal’s new website’s homepage. Conveniently, more recent content has been made available from the Articles space.

“It’s an honour to partner with an esteemed institution like the United Arab Emirates University. We are confident that in ARPHA Platform, our new partners will find a great fit for the immaculate professionalism, integrity and overall appeal of the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Being the first Middle Eastern journal to join ARPHA’s journal portfolio, EJFA has already become a very special client of ours.”

“We are really excited to partner with Pensoft and run the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture on the ARPHA platform. This decision by the UAEU will really help the journal to reach the next level with the experience of the Pensoft team and the high-end technology of ARPHA. We believe that this strategic partnership will boost the visibility and accessibility of our journal globally. Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities,” says EJFA’s Editor-in-Chief, Abdul Jaleel.