About

Focus and Scope

One Ecosystem is an innovative Open Access scholarly journal which provides a forum for studies in the field of ecology and sustainability. In addition to conventional research papers, the journal welcomes contributions documenting the entire research cycle, including data, models, methods, workflows, results, software, perspectives, and policy recommendations.

The journal will specifically address the following topics: Ecosystem services, Climate change, Landscape ecology, Land use change, Marine and freshwater ecology, Forest ecology and forestry, Agriculture, Tourism, Urban ecology, Restoration ecology, Environmental impact assessment, Health, Waste and water management, Sustainable land development, Environmental economics and policy, and Urban development.

Ecosystem services mapping and assessment, including aspects related to ecosystem services indicators, modeling of potentials, flows, and demands, represent a topic of special interest for One Ecosystem.

One Ecosystem is published on the ARPHA platform, which is up to now the first workflow ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript, from writing through submission, public peer review, publication and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform. A list of the unique features of ARPHA can be found here.

The journal will establish partnerships and links with the following institutions and networks:

Learn more in our introductory presentation or from our flyer.


Our Mission

One Ecosystem aims to respond and adapt to the newest developments in scholarly publishing and at the same time, addresses highly relevant scientific and societal topics.

In the last decades we have been witnessing an unprecedented shift in scholarly publishing which greatly influences the academic environment. Open access to content and data is quickly becoming the prevailing model in academic publishing, resulting in part from changes to policies of governments and funding agencies and in part from scientists’ desire to get their work more widely read and used.

Ecological and sustainability sciences are strongly based on large communities of researchers, policy and decision makers as well as citizens to jointly develop and apply research outcomes. Open access benefits scientists with greater dissemination and citation of their work, and provides the society as a whole access to the latest research findings. This is recognized as an accelerator of science and thus largely adapted by the new generation of scholars. However, in Ecology and Sustainability domains, only a small proportion of research outputs have been freely accessible to the public up to now.

By making research outputs publicly available and to allow for different forms of publications, the journal will open up new mechanisms for integration of information, collaboration, appraisal, and dissemination.

Through its technologically advanced publishing platform and innovative publishing model, all data that underpin a given study will be made free to everyone and integrated into relevant and domain-specific global data repositories. Large data sets (e.g., ecological observations, environmental and other data types) can be deposited in the Dryad Data Repository, either prior to or upon acceptance of the manuscript. Furthermore, a novel community-based peer review will be introduced for the first time in these academic disciplines and thus provide the opportunity for a large number of specialists in the field to review a manuscript.


Unique Publishing Features

One Ecosystem demonstrates several innovations in both, technological and social aspects of the academic publishing practices. These are some of the features that make this new journal really unique in its field:

  • The journal is published on ARPHA, the first online collaborative platform and workflow ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript, from writing through submission, peer review, publication and dissemination.

  • In addition to conventional research articles, One Ecosystem allows publishing research outputs along all stages of the research cycle, such as data, software, model descriptions, monitoring description, workflows, methodology, project deliverables, policy recommendations and briefs, ES inventories, maps and even single images.

  • Most structural elements of the published article – text, tables, figures, etc. are treated and stored as DATA.

  • Authors are requested to supply all data underlying given research as supplementary files to allow reproduction of experiments and re-use of data.

  • The journal provides possibility for automated import of data-structured manuscripts generated in various platforms, such as ScratchpadsGBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), Ecosystem Services tools, author’s databases.

  • The journal is using entirely XML-based workflow; typesetting is completely avoided because authoring, publishing and reviewing all occur in the same, entirely Web-based system.

  • The online, collaborative, manuscript-authoring platform ARPHA provides a large set of pre-defined, but flexible, article templates covering all types of outcomes. Within ARPHA, authors may work collaboratively on a manuscript and invite external contributors, such as mentors, potential reviewers, linguistic and copy editors, colleagues, who may correct and comment on the text before submission.

  • A rich set of functionalities of the ARPHA Writing Tool allows for search and import of literature and data references, cross-referencing of in-text citations of literature, tables, images and supplementary material. The tool has an automated technical validation step which will save your time by checking your manuscript for consistency.

  • Authors and reviewers may opt for entirely open review process. Furthermore, authors are given the option to submit reviews or supporting statements from experts in the subject along with their submission (pre-submission reviews) for editor’s consideration to facilitate the manuscript evaluation and speed up the publishing process. All reviews are consolidated into a single online file which makes the process of editing straightforward, easy and pleasant. The journal allows also a post-publication review.

  • Low cost, decoupled and transparent publishing services.


Policies


Open Access

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.


Copyright Notice

License and Copyright Agreement

In submitting the manuscript to any of Pensoft’s journals, authors certify that: 

  • They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements. 
  • The work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review or thesis); it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; its publication has been approved by all author(s) and responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out. 
  • They secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or where copyright is owned by someone else. 
  • They agree to the following license and copyright agreement:

Copyright

  • Copyright on any article is retained by the author(s) or the author's employer. Regarding copyright transfers please see below. 
  • Authors grant Pensoft Publishers a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. 
  • Authors grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its original authors and citation details are identified. 
  • The article and published supplementary material are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0):

Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0)

Anyone is free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work 
to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. The original authors must be given credit. 

  • For any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are. 
  • Any of these conditions can be waived if the copyright holders give permission. 
  • Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.

The full legal code of this license.

Copyright Transfers

Any usage rights are regulated through the Creative Commons License. Since Pensoft Publishers is using the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), anyone (the author, their institution/company, the publisher and the public) is free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work as long as the original author is credited (see above). Therefore, specific usage rights cannot be reserved by the author or their institution/company and the publisher cannot include a statement "all rights reserved" in any published paper.

Website design and publishing framework: Copyright © Pensoft Publishers.

CLOCKSS system has permission to ingest, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit.


Privacy Statement

The personal information used on this website is to be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal. It will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.


Authorship/Contributorship

Some journals are integrated with Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT), in order to recognise individual author input within a publication, thereby ensuring professional and ethical conduct, while avoiding authorship disputes, gift / ghost authorship and similar pressing issues in academic publishing.

During manuscript submission, the submitting author is strongly recommended to specify a contributor role for each of co-author, i.e. Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing - Original draft, Writing - Review and Editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding Acquisition (see more). For the journals that are not integrated with CRediT, the submitting author is encouraged to specify the roles as a free text. Once published the article will include the contributor role for all authors in the article metadata.


Use of AI

Authors must be transparent about the use of Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and other large language models in the manuscript preparation, and disclose details of how the AI tool was used within the "Materials and Methods" section.


Desk Rejection

During the pre-review evaluation, Editors-in-Chief or Subject editors check the manuscript for compliance with the journal's guidelines, focus, and scope. At this point, they may reject a manuscript prior to sending it out for peer review, specifying the reasons. The most common ones are non-conformity with the journal's focus, scope and policies and/or low scientific or linguistic quality. In such cases, authors are encouraged to considerably improve their manuscript and resubmit it for a review. We encourage authors whose manuscripts have been desk rejected due to being out of the scope of this journal to consider another potentially suitable title from the Pensoft portfolio.

In case the manuscript is suitable for the journal but has to be corrected technically or linguistically, it will be returned to the authors for improvement. The authors will not need to re-submit the manuscript but only to upload the corrected file(s) to their existing submission.


Peer Review

This journal uses a single-blind peer review process. This means that the names of reviewers are hidden from the authors (the author does not know the identity of the reviewer, but the reviewer knows the identity of the author). Notwithstanding that, the reviewers are encouraged to disclose their identities, if they wish to do so. Each article is reviewed by at least two independent experts, with a final decision on acceptance being made by the Subject Editor / Editor-in-Chief. Front-matter articles, such as editorials, correspondence, biographies, and similar articles, can be published after editorial evaluation only.

Please consider the Editor and Reviewer Guidelines in the About webpage of this journal for more details and stepwise instructions on the editorial and peer review process.


Preprints

This journal allows posting preprints of the manuscripts submitted for peer-review. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the ARPHA Preprints server for that as an option available during the submission process, which will save a double effort in manuscript submission and allows the preprint to be directly linked to the published article and vice versa.

Manuscripts that contain nomenclatural acts in the sense of the biological Codes will not be posted as preprints even when the authors opt for that, to avoid possible confusion in the priority of names and validity of publication.


Indexing and Archiving

The articles published in the journal are indexed by a high number of industry leading indexers and repositories. The journal content is archived in CLOCKSS, Zenodo, Portico and other international archives. The full list of indexes and archives are shown on the journal homepage.

The authors are allowed to publish preprints of their manuscripts on ARPHA Preprints or other preprint servers. The deposition and distribution of preprints and final article versions is highly encouraged.


Advertising

The journal will consider inquiries for the placement of advertisements as a banner (specified size) in a dedicated section on the journal’s homepage on a case-by-case basis. Each request will be subject to evaluation by the journal’s management team in order to determine if the content is appropriate and that it does not infringe the rights of any persons or other third parties. The content should be related to the journal’s topical focus. Illegal, discriminatory, obscene, abusive, pornographic, and otherwise harmful or offensive content will not be permissible. The journal does not endorse and is not liable for the content of advertisements displayed on its website.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

General

The publishing ethics and malpractice policies follow the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, WAME, and OASPA), the NISO Recommended Practices for the Presentation and Identification of E-Journals (PIE-J), and, where relevant, the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals from ICMJE.

Privacy statement

The personal information used on this website is to be used exclusively for the stated purposes of each particular journal. It will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party. 

Open access

Pensoft and ARPHA-hosted journals adhere strictly to gold open access to accelerate the barrier-free dissemination of scientific knowledge. All published articles are made freely available to read, download, and distribute immediately upon publication, given that the original source and authors are cited (Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0)).

Open data publishing and sharing

Pensoft and ARPHA encourage open data publication and sharing, in accordance with Panton’s Principles and FAIR Data Principles. For the domain of biodiversity-related publications Pensoft has specially developed extended Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data. Specific data publishing guidelines are available on the journal website. 

Data can be published in various ways, such as preservation in data repositories linked to the respective article or as data files or packages supplementary to the article. Datasets should be deposited in an appropriate, trusted repository and the associated identifier (URL or DOI) of the dataset(s) must be included in the data resources section of the article. Reference(s) to datasets should also be included in the reference list of the article with DOIs (where available). Where no discipline-specific data repository exists authors should deposit their datasets in a general repository such as, for example Zenodo or others. 

Submission, peer review and editorial process

The peer review and editorial processes are facilitated through an online editorial system and a set of email notifications. Pensoft journals’ websites display stepwise description of the editorial process and list all necessary instructions and links. These links are also included in the respective email notification.

General: Publication and authorship

  • All submitted papers are subject to a rigorous peer review process by at least two international reviewers who are experts in the scientific field of the particular paper. 
  • The factors that are taken into account in review are relevance, soundness, significance, originality, readability and language. 
  • A declaration of potential Conflicts of Interest is a mandatory step in the submission process. The declaration becomes part of the article metadata and is displayed in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article.
  • The journals allow several rounds of review of a manuscript. The ultimate responsibility for editorial decisions lies with the respective Subject Editor and, in some cases, with the Editor-in-Chief. All appeals should be directed to the Editor-in-Chief, who may decide to seek advice among the Subject Editors and Reviewers.
  • The possible decisions include: (1) Accept, (2) Minor revisions, (3) Major revisions, (4) Reject, but re-submission encouraged and (5) Reject. 
  • If Authors are encouraged to revise and re-submit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted. 
  • The paper acceptance is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. 
  • No research can be included in more than one publication.
  • Editors-in-Chief, managing editors and their deputies are strongly recommended to limit the amount of papers co-authored by them. As a rule of thumb, research papers (co-)authored by Editors-in-Chief, managing editors and their deputies must not exceed 20% of the publications a year, with a clear task to drop this proportion below 15%. By adopting this practice, the journal is taking extra precaution to avoid endogeny and conflicts of interest, while ensuring the editorial decision-making process remains transparent and fair.
  • Editors-in-Chief, managing editors and handling editors are not allowed to handle manuscripts co-authored by them.

Responsibility of Authors

  • Authors are required to agree that their paper will be published in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) license.
  • Authors must certify that their manuscripts are their original work. 
  • Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere. 
  • Authors must certify that the manuscript is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. 
  • Authors should submit the manuscript in linguistically and grammatically correct English and formatted in accordance with the journal’s Author Guidelines.
  • Authors must participate in the peer review process. 
  • Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes. 
  • All Authors mentioned are expected to have significantly contributed to the research. 
  • Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest. 
  • Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript. 
  • Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors.
  • Authors should acknowledge all significant funders of the research pertaining to their article and list all relevant competing interests.   
  • Other sources of support for publications should also be clearly identified in the manuscript, usually in an acknowledgement (e.g. funding for the article processing charge; language editing or editorial assistance).
  • The Corresponding author should provide the declaration of any conflicts of interest on behalf of all Authors. Conflicts of interest may be associated with employment, sources of funding, personal financial interests, membership of relevant organisations or others.

Responsibility of Reviewers

  • The manuscripts will be reviewed by two or three experts in order to reach first decision as soon as possible. Reviewers do not need to sign their reports but are welcome to do so. They are also asked to declare any conflicts of interests.
  • Reviewers are not expected to provide a thorough linguistic editing or copyediting of a manuscript, but to focus on its scientific quality, as well as for the overall style, which should correspond to the good practices in clear and concise academic writing. If Reviewers recognize that a manuscript requires linguistic edits, they should inform both Authors and Editor in the report.
  • Reviewers are asked to check whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, how interesting it is and whether the quality of the writing is acceptable.
  • In cases of strong disagreement between the reviews or between the Authors and Reviewers, the Editors can judge these according to their expertise or seek advice from a member of the journal's Editorial Board.
  • Reviewers are also asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles may be given greater prominence and greater external publicity, including press releases addressed to science journalists and mass media.
  • During a second review round, the Reviewer may be asked by the Subject Editor to evaluate the revised version of the manuscript with regards to Reviewer’s recommendations submitted during the first review round.
  • Reviewers are asked to be polite and constructive in their reports. Reports that may be insulting or uninformative will be rescinded.
  • Reviewers are asked to start their report with a very brief summary of the reviewed paper. This will help the Editors and Authors see whether the reviewer correctly understood the paper or whether a report might be based on misunderstanding.
  • Further, Reviewers are asked to comment on originality, structure and previous research: (1) Is the paper sufficiently novel and does it contribute to a better understanding of the topic under scrutiny? Is the work rather confirmatory and repetitive? (2) Is the introduction clear and concise? Does it place the work into the context that is necessary for a reader to comprehend the aims, hypotheses tested, experimental design or methods? Are Material and Methods clearly described and sufficiently explained? Are reasons given when choosing one method over another one from a set of comparable methods? Are the results clearly but concisely described? Do they relate to the topic outlined in the introduction? Do they follow a logical sequence? Does the discussion place the paper in scientific context and go a step beyond the current scientific knowledge on the basis of the results? Are competing hypotheses or theories reasonably related to each other and properly discussed? Do conclusions seem reasonable?  Is previous research adequately incorporated into the paper? Are references complete, necessary and accurate? Is there any sign that substantial parts of the paper were copies of other works?
  • Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
  • Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information. 
  • Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments. 
  • Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  • Reviewers should also call to the Editors’ attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.

Responsibility of Editors

  • Editors in Pensoft’s journals carry the main responsibility for the scientific quality of the published papers and base their decisions solely on the papers' importance, originality, clarity and relevance to publication's scope.
  • The Subject Editor takes the final decision on a manuscript’s acceptance or rejection and his/her name is listed as "Academic Editor" in the header of each article.
  • The Subject Editors are not expected to provide a thorough linguistic editing or copyediting of a manuscript, but to focus on its scientific quality, as well as the overall style, which should correspond to the good practices in clear and concise academic writing. 
  • Editors are expected to spot small errors in orthography or stylistic during the editing process and correct them.
  • Editors should always consider the needs of the Authors and the Readers when attempting to improve the publication. 
  • Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record. 
  • Editors should preserve the anonymity of Reviewers, unless the latter decide to disclose their identities. 
  • Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines. 
  • Editors should act if they suspect misconduct and make all reasonable attempts to obtain a resolution to the problem. 
  • Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions, they should have proof of misconduct.
  • Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between Authors, Reviewers and Board Members.
  • Editors are allowed to publish a limited proportion of papers per year co-authored by them, after considering some extra precautions to avoid an impression of impropriety, endogeny, conflicts of interest and ensure that the editorial decision-making process is transparent and fair.
  • Editors-in-Chief, managing editors and handling editors are not allowed to handle manuscripts co-authored by them.
           

Neutrality to geopolitical disputes

General

The strict policy of Pensoft and its journals is to stay neutral to any political or territorial dispute. Authors should depoliticize their studies by avoiding provoking remarks, disputable geopolitical statements and controversial map designations; disputable territories should be referred to as well-recognised and non-controversial geographical areas. Тhe journal reserves the right to mark such areas at least as disputable at or after publication, to publish editor's notes, or to reject/retract the paper.

Authors' affiliations

Pensoft does not take decisions regarding the actual affiliations of institutions. Authors are advised to provide their affiliation as indicated on the official internet site of their institution.

Editors 

Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself.

Human and animal rights

The ethical standards in medical and pharmacological studies are based on the Helsinki declaration (1964, amended in 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, 2000 and 2013) of the World Medical Association and the Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals of the World Association of Medical Journals (WAME).

Authors of studies including experiments on humans or human tissues should declare in their cover letter a compliance with the ethical standards of the respective institutional or regional committee on human experimentation and attach committee’s statement and informed consent; for those researchers who do not have access to formal ethics review committees, the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki should be followed and declared in the cover letter. Patients’ names, initials, or hospital numbers should not be used, not in the text nor in any illustrative material, tables of databases, unless the author presents a written permission from each patient to use his or her personal data. Photos or videos of patients should be taken after a warning and agreement of the patient or of a legal authority acting on his or her behalf.

Animal experiments require full compliance with local, national, ethical, and regulatory principles, and local licensing arrangements and respective statements of compliance (or approvals of institutional ethical committees where such exists) should be included in the article text.

Informed consent

Individual participants in studies have the right to decide what happens to the identifiable personal data gathered, to what they have said during a study or an interview, as well as to any photograph that was taken. Hence it is important that all participants gave their informed consent in writing prior to inclusion in the study. Identifying details (names, dates of birth, identity numbers and other information) of the participants that were studied should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and genetic profiles unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the participant (or parent or guardian if the participant is incapable) gave written informed consent for publication. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve in some cases, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic profiles, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning.

The following statement should be included in the article text in one of the following ways:

  • "Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study."
  • "Informed consent was obtained from all individuals for whom identifying information is included in this article." (In case some patients’ data have been published in the article or supplementary materials to it).

Gender issues

We encourage the use of gender-neutral language, such as 'chairperson' instead of 'chairman' or 'chairwomen', as well as 'they' instead of 'she/he' and 'their' instead of  'him/her' (or consider restructuring the sentence).

Conflict of interest

During the editorial process, the following relationships between editors and authors are considered conflicts of interest: Colleagues currently working in the same research group or department, recent co-authors, and doctoral students for which the editor served as committee chair. During the submission process, the authors are kindly advised to identify possible conflicts of interest with the journal editors. After manuscripts are assigned to the handling editor, individual editors are required to inform the managing editor of any possible conflicts of interest with the authors. Journal submissions are also assigned to referees to minimize conflicts of interest. After manuscripts are assigned for review, referees are asked to inform the editor of any conflicts that may exist.

Appeals and open debate

We encourage academic debate and constructive criticism. Authors are always invited to respond to any editorial correspondence before publication. Authors are not allowed to neglect unfavorable comments about their work and choose not to respond to criticisms. 

No Reviewer’s comment or published correspondence may contain a personal attack on any of the Authors. Criticism of the work is encouraged. Editors should edit (or reject) personal or offensive statements. Authors should submit their appeal on editorial decisions to the Editorial Office, addressed to the Editor-in-Chief or to the Managing Editor. Authors are discouraged from directly contacting Editorial Board Members and Editors with appeals.

Editors will mediate all discussions between Authors and Reviewers during the peer review process prior to publication. If agreement cannot be reached, Editors may consider inviting additional reviewers if appropriate. 

The Editor-in-Chief will mediate all discussions between Authors and Subject Editors.

The journals encourage publication of open opinions, forum papers, corrigenda, critical comments on a published paper and Author’s response to criticism.

Misconduct

Research misconduct may include: (a)  manipulating research materials, equipment or processes; (b) changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the article; c) plagiarism. Research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion. If misconduct is suspected, journal Editors will act in accordance with the relevant COPE guidelines.

Plagiarism and duplicate publication policy
A special case of misconduct is plagiarism, which is the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit. Plagiarism is considered theft of intellectual property and manuscripts submitted to this journal which contain substantial unattributed textual copying from other papers will be immediately rejected. Editors are advised to check manuscripts for plagiarism via the iThenticate service by clicking on the "ïThenticate report" button. Journal providing a peer review in languages other than English (for example, Russian) may use other plagiarism checking services (for example, Antiplagiat). 
Instances, when authors re-use large parts of their publications without providing a clear reference to the original source, are considered duplication of work. Slightly changed published works submitted in multiple journals is not acceptable practice either. In cases of plagiarism in an already published paper or duplicate publication, an announcement will be made on the journal publication page and a procedure of retraction will be triggered.

Responses to possible misconduct

All allegations of misconduct must be referred to the Editor-In-Chief. Upon the thorough examination, the Editor-In-Chief and deputy editors should conclude if the case concerns a possibility of misconduct. All allegations should be kept confidential and references to the matter in writing should be kept anonymous, whenever possible.

Should a comment on potential misconduct be submitted by the Reviewers or Editors, an explanation will be sought from the Authors. If it is satisfactory and the issue is the result of either a mistake or misunderstanding, the matter can be easily resolved. If not, the manuscript will be rejected or retracted and the Editors may impose a ban on that individual's publication in the journals for a certain period of time. In cases of published plagiarism or dual publication, an announcement will be made in both journals explaining the situation.

When allegations concern authors, the peer review and publication process for their submission will be halted until completion of the aforementioned process. The investigation will be carried out even if the authors withdraw the manuscript, and implementation of the responses below will be considered.

When allegations concern reviewers or editors, they will be replaced in the review process during the ongoing investigation of the matter. Editors or reviewers who are found to have engaged in scientific misconduct should be removed from further association with the journal, and this fact reported to their institution.

Retraction policies

Article retraction

According to the COPE Retraction Guidelines followed by this Journal, an article can be retracted because of the following reasons:

  • Unreliable findings based on clear evidence of a misconduct (e.g. fraudulent use of the data) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).
  • Redundant publication, e.g., findings that have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission or justification.
  • Plagiarism or other kind of unethical research.

Retraction procedure

  • Retraction should happen after a careful consideration by the Journal editors of allegations coming from the editors, authors, or readers.
  • The HTML version of the retracted article is removed (except for the article metadata) and on its place a retraction note is issued.
  • The PDF of the retracted article is left on the website but clearly watermarked with the note "Retracted" on each page.
  • In some rare cases (e.g., for legal reasons or health risk) the retracted article can be replaced with a new corrected version containing apparent link to the retracted original version and a retraction note with a history of the document.

Expression of concern

In other cases, the Journal editors should consider issuing an expression of concern, if evidence is available for:

  • Inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct by the authors.
  • Unreliable findings that are unreliable but the authors’ institution will not investigate the case.
  • A belief that an investigation into alleged misconduct related to the publication either has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive.
  • An investigation is underway but a judgement will not be available for a considerable time.

Errata and Corrigenda

Pensoft journals largely follow the ICMJE guidelines for corrections and errata.

Errata

Admissible and insignificant errors in a published article that do not affect the article content or scientific integrity (e.g. typographic errors, broken links, wrong page numbers in the article headers etc.) can be corrected through publishing of an erratum. This happens through replacing the original PDF with the corrected one together with a correction notice on the Erratum Tab of the HTML version of the paper, detailing the errors and the changes implemented in the original PDF. The original PDF will be marked with a correction note and an indication to the corrected version of the erratum article. The original PDF will also be archived and made accessible via a link in the same Erratum Tab.

Authors are also encouraged to post comments and indicate typographical errors on their articles to the Comments tab of the HTML version of the article.

Corrigenda

Corrigenda should be published in cases when significant errors are discovered in a published article. Usually, such errors affect the scientific integrity of the paper and could vary in scale. Reasons for publishing corrigenda may include changes in authorship, unintentional mistakes in published research findings and protocols, errors in labelling of tables and figures or others. In taxonomic journals, corrigenda are often needed in cases where the errors affect nomenclatural acts. Corrigenda are published as a separate publication and bear their own DOI. Examples of published corrigenda are available here.

The decision for issuing errata or corrigenda is with the editors after discussion with the authors.


COPE Compliance

This journal endorses the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines and will pursue cases of suspected research and publication misconduct (e.g. falsification, unethical experimentation, plagiarism, inappropriate image manipulation, redundant publication). For further information about COPE please see the website for COPE at http://www.publicationethics.org and journal's Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement.

Terms of Use

This document describes the Terms of Use of the services provided by the One Ecosystem journal, hereinafter referred to as "the Journal" or "this Journal". All Users agree to these Terms of Use when signing up to this Journal. Signed Journal Users will be hereinafter referred to as "User" or "Users".

The publication services to the Journal are provided by Pensoft Publishers Ltd., through its publishing platform ARPHA, hereinafter referred to as "the Provider".

The Provider reserves the right to update the Terms of Use occasionally. Users will be notified via posting on the site and/or by email. If using the services of the Journal after such notice, the User will be deemed to have accepted the proposed modifications. If the User disagrees with the modifications, he/she should stop using the Journal services. Users are advised to periodically check the Terms of Use for updates or revisions. Violation of any of the terms will result in the termination of the User's account. The Provider is not responsible for any content posted by the User in the Journal.

Account Terms

  1. For registration in this Journal or any of the services or tools hosted on it, Users must provide their full legal name, a valid email address, postal address, affiliation (if any),  and any other information requested.
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Author Guidelines

Authoring a manuscript in the ARPHA Writing Tool

For manuscripts intended for submission to One Ecosystem, we offer the authors to write in the online collaborative ARPHA Writing Tool. ARPHA provides flexible article templates to be selected in the tool after clicking on the "Start a manuscript" button. ARPHA further provides a rich set of functionalities, which makes the collaborative work of the authors and their peers easy and pleasant. The authoring process in ARPHA is described in fine detail in the Tips and Tricks menu of the writing tool.

There are NO author guidelines in One Ecosystem with regard to text formatting. The ARPHA Writing Tool will guide you during the authoring and submission process. Please consider Tips and Tricks if you need some assistance or contact helpdesk@pensoft. net. There are only a few simple rules to follow, so please please read carefully the half page of text below before you start your manuscript!


Select Article Type

One Ecosystem considers the following categories of papers for publication:

  1. Research Article
  2. Review Article
  3. Data Paper
  4. Software Description
  5. Methods
  6. Ecosystem Inventory
  7. Ecosystem Services Mapping
  8. Ecosystem Service Models ​
  9. Monitoring Schema
  10. Case Study
  11. Single-media Publication
  12. Correspondence 
  13. Editorial
  14. Corrigendum 
  15. Short Communication

OneEcosystem shall consider for publication manuscripts related to the following topics:

  • Ecology & Conservation
  • Sustainable development
  • Ecosystem structures, processes and functions
  • Ecosystem services
  • Landscape ecology, land use change
  • Environmental impact assessment
  • Marine and freshwater ecology
  • Environmental management
  • Environmental economics
  • Climate change
  • Management and business studies
  • Education and capacity building
  • Habitat and species conservation
  • Biodiversity monitoring
  • Macroecology
  • Evolution
  • Forest ecology and forestry
  • Urban ecology
  • Restoration ecology
  • Landscape planning and infrastructures
  • Societal aspects of nature conservation
  • Environmental policies and law
  • Sociological aspects and public engagement
  • Data publishing, Ecological Informatics, and Modeling
  • Data management and environmental statistics
  • Publication of databases and ecological information systems
  • Web-based tools
  • Environmental modelling

Criteria for Publication

To be accepted for publication in One Ecosystem, the following criteria must be fulfilled:

  • Papers and associated data must be novel and contribute to a better understanding of the topic under scrutiny. Studies that have already been published or submissions that are currently under consideration for publication elsewhere will not be accepted for publication.
  • Previously published information should be considered and cited in compliance with the good academic practice. References should be complete and accurate, where possible including DOIs or links to the article. All figures included in manuscripts should be copyright free and duly acknowledge the original source.
  • All data underpinning an article, including data tables on which graphs are produced, must be published alongside the paper, e.g. as supplementary files, or links to external repositories where data are deposited, and contain sufficient metadata to facilitate data discovery.
  • Manuscripts should be concisely written, in a good academic style, and follow a logical sequence. The voice - active or passive - and the tense used should be consistent throughout the manuscript. Results should be clearly and concisely described and supported by the data published with the article, or data published elsewhere but linked to the article.
  • This journal has well-defined policies for English language editing. Involving mandatory outsourced language editing services would considerably increase the price of the Article Processing Charges, which would become an additional obstacle for persons and institutions to publish in the journal. Therefore, we rely both on the conscience of our authors to provide stylistically written texts and our editors and reviewers to filter out badly written manuscripts.
  • Manuscripts must be submitted in English. Authors should confirm the English language quality of their texts or alternatively request thorough linguistic editing prior to peer review at a price. Manuscripts written in poor English are a subject of rejection prior to peer review.

Prepare Your Manuscript

1. How can I decide which article type to choose?

The article templates in ARPHA are created to facilitate the structured publishing of science content and ease discoverability and machine-readability of your work. You can change the article templates, add new sections or subsections or move them within the manuscript. However, we would recommend using these changes only in case of necessity. There is also free text manuscript template, which may be used for editorials, correspondence, opinion papers, and others.

2. How can I cite references, figures and tables?

  • Please do not insert in-text citations of references, figures or tables manually! The citations will be inserted automatically at the place of your cursor through the "Cite a figure", "Cite a table", "Cite a reference" or "Cite a supplementary material" commands. Once you select the place you want to insert a citation, click on the desired reference, table or figure from the respective list (see next).

  • Before citing a reference, figure, table or supplementary material, you have to upload these, so that they become visible in the respective list of figures, tables or references.

  • Please do not number captions of figures or tables – they will be numbered automatically and can be re-ordered, if needed.

  • All uploaded figures, tables and references must be cited in the text and vice versa.

3. Materials and methods

In line with responsible and reproducible research, as well as FAIR data principles, we highly recommend that authors describe in detail and deposit their science methods and laboratory protocols in the open access repository protocols.io.

Once deposited on protocols.io, protocols and methods will be issued a unique digital object identifier (DOI), which could be then used to link a manuscript to the relevant deposited protocol. By doing this, authors could allow for editors and peers to access the protocol when reviewing the submission to significantly expedite the process.

Furthermore, an author could open up his/her protocol to the public at the click of a button as soon as their article is published.

Stepwise instructions:

  1. Prepare a detailed protocol via protocols.io.

  2. Click Get DOI to assign a persistent identifier to your protocol.

  3. Add the DOI link to the Methods section of your manuscript prior to submitting it for peer review.

  4. Click Publish to make your protocol openly accessible as soon as your article is published (optional).

  5. Update your protocols anytime.

Pre-submission technical validation

The ARPHA Writing Tool provides automated technical pre-submission validation steps to save your time by checking your manuscript for consistency.

In addition, a pre-submission technical review is performed for all manuscripts in ARPHA by the Editorial Office against formal checklist criteria such as: technical consistency, language, ethical issues, correspondence to the journal’s criteria for publication, focus, and scope. The One Ecosystem editors can re-iterate the technical evaluation process several times until the manuscript reaches an acceptable level of quality to be submitted to One Ecosystem.

Submission

Manuscripts for One Ecosystem should be prepared for submission in the ARPHA Writing Tool.

During the submission process, the author(s) should:

  1. Suggest a number of referees, for the assigned Subject Editor's consideration, as the latter might wish to invite some or all of them to review the manuscript.

  2. Answer a couple of other questions about copyright, authorship, ethical issues, and publication fees.

Publication

Manuscripts will be published upon acceptance on behalf of the appointed Subject Editor, in the latest version submitted by the authors (upon the acceptance), and after payment of the article processing charges is released. The final production stage does NOT include an exchange of proofs. Therefore, no further corrections of the latest version submitted by the authors would be applied.


Author Contributions

The journal is integrated with Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT), in order to recognise individual author input within a publication, thereby ensuring professional and ethical conduct, while avoiding authorship disputes, gift / ghost authorship and similar pressing issues in academic publishing.

During manuscript submission, the submitting author is strongly recommended to select a contributor role for each of co-author, using a list of 14 predefined roles, i.e. Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing - Original draft, Writing - Review and Editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding Acquisition (see more). Once published, the article will be including the contributor role for all authors in the article metadata.


Authorship of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools do not meet authorship criteria and thus cannot be listed as authors on manuscripts, nor cited as authors. If AI or AI-assisted tools have been used in the preparation of a manuscript, this must be appropriately declared with sufficient details in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.

Preprints

The journal is integrated with the ARPHA Preprints platform, thereby allowing authors to post their pre-review manuscript as a preprint by simply checking the relevant box while completing the submission of their manuscript.

Due to the integration, the authors are not required to re-format or submit any additional files, as the system uses the manuscript to automatically generate a preprint. Subject to a basic editorial screening, the preprint will be posted on ARPHA Preprints within a few days after the manuscript’s submission.

When submitting their manuscripts and requesting a preprint publication authors must keep in mind that preprints are preliminary versions of works accessible electronically in advance of publication of the final version. They are not issued for the purposes of botanical, mycological or zoological nomenclature and are not effectively/validly published in the meaning of the Codes. Therefore, papers containing or dealing with nomenclatural novelties (new names) or other nomenclatural acts (designations of type, choices of priority between names, choices between orthographic variants, or choices of gender of names) will NOT be posted as preprints.

Explore the Benefits of posting a preprint or visit ARPHA’s blog to learn more about ARPHA Preprints.

Find more about how to submit your preprint in the ARPHA Manual.


Processing Your Manuscript


Peer Review

Text and data submitted to One Ecosystem will be formally peer-reviewed and evaluated for technical soundness and the correct presentation of appropriate and sufficient metadata. All manuscripts undergo a pre-submission technical evaluation in the ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT) environment. The scientific quality and importance of the paper and data will be further judged by the scientific community, through a novel community-based pre-publication and post-publication peer review.

Reviewers may opt to be anonymous or to disclose their names. The deadlines for the peer review and editorial processes are strict and limited to a maximum of two months after submission.

The peer review process and deadlines described below are articulated on the assumption that the contributions are technically well-prepared and concisely written so that the peer review is easy, straightforward and not requiring much time from the reviewer.

What is "community peer review"?

It is evident that the peer review system is increasingly under strain. Our response to this situation is to decrease the load on each individual reviewer without in any way compromising the quality of the final product. The purpose of community peer review is to distribute effort, increase transparency, engage the broader community of experts, and enhance the quality of the science we publish.

Stepwise description of the peer review and editorial process

1. Upon submission, the manuscript is assigned to the Subject Editor responsible for the topic by the in-house Assistant Editor. The Subject Editor is alerted by email.
2. The Subject Editor reads the manuscript and decides if it complies with the journal's scope and should be processed for peer review.
3. The Subject Editor sends review requests to two or three "nominated" reviewers and several other "panel" reviewers. 

Note-1: How editors invite reviewers? The journal's database will provide a list of potential reviewers and if necessary the editor can add additional names to the list. Review requests will be emailed by a ‘single-click’ option.

Note-2: "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers. The difference between "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers is that "Nominated" reviewers are expected to provide a formal review by the deadline; "Panel" reviewers are invited but not required to evaluate the manuscript. Both "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers can propose changes and corrections, and make comments in the manuscript online and submit a concise reviewer's form.

Note-3: "Community" and "public" peer review. "Community" peer review means that during the peer review process the manuscript is visible only to editor, the reviewers and the authors. We are planning to introduce soon an entirely public review process where authors may opt to make their manuscript available for comment by all registered journal users. Reviewers may opt to stay anonymous or disclose their names in either case.

4. The Subject Editor receives a notification email if the nominated reviewer agrees or declines to review the manuscript. In the latter case the editor can appoint alternative reviewers.
5. Reviews are expected within 10 days and can be extended on demand. The Subject Editor will then decide to accept, reject, or request revision of the manuscripts.

Note-4: Provision of reviews. Reviewers will be prompted to provide an evaluation by an automated email notification sent one day after the deadline. In case of further longer delay, the review request can be canceled automatically or by the Subject editor.

6. The authors must provide a revised version of their manuscript within one week, but can ask for an extension, if there is a demonstratable need.
7. After submission of the revised version, the Subject Editor compares it against the reviews through an easy-to-use online tool and decides to accept or reject the manuscript. The authors may be asked to make additional revisions, OR in case of substantial changes, the reviewing procedure will be started again.
8. The manuscript will be formatted, proof-read, copy-edited and published within two weeks after acceptance.

Guidelines for reviewers and editors

Reviewers and editors of the One Ecosystem are expected to evaluate the completeness and quality of the manuscript text, related dataset(s) and their description (metadata), as well as the publication value of data. This may include the appropriateness and validity of the methods used, compliance with applicable standards during collection, management and curation of data, and compliance with appropriate metadata standards in the description of the data resources.

The following aspects of evaluation will be considered:

  • Quality of the manuscript
    • Is the study sufficiently novel and contributes to a better understanding of the topic, or is the work rather confirmatory and repetitive?
    • Do the title, abstract and keywords accurately reflect the contents and data?
    • Is the manuscript consistent, suitably organised and written in grammatically correct English?
    • Are the relevant non-textual data and media (data sets, audio and video files) also available as supplementary files to the manuscript or as links to external repositories?
    • Have abbreviations and symbols been properly defined?
    • Does the manuscript put the data resource being described properly into the context of prior research, citing pertinent articles and datasets?
    • Are conflicts of interest, relevant permissions and other ethical issues addressed in an appropriate manner?
  • Quality of the data
    • Are the data completely and consistently recorded within the dataset(s)?
    • Does the data resource cover scientifically important and sufficiently large region(s), time period(s) and/or group(s) of taxa to be worthy of publication?
    • Are the data consistent internally and described using applicable standards (e.g. in terms of file formats, file names, file size, units and metadata)?
    • Are the methods used to process and analyses the raw data, thereby creating processed data or analytical results, sufficiently well documented that they could be repeated by third parties?
    • Are the data correct, given the protocols? Authors are encouraged to report any tests undertaken to address this point.
    • Is the repository to which the data are submitted appropriate for the nature of the data?
  • Consistency between manuscript and data
    • Does the manuscript provide an accurate description of the data?
    • Does the manuscript properly describe how to access the data?
    • Are the methods used to generate the data (including calibration, code and suitable controls) described in sufficient detail?
    • Is the dataset sufficiently novel to merit publication?
    • Have possible sources of error been appropriately addressed in the protocols and/ or the paper?
    • Is anything missing in the manuscript or the data resource itself that would prevent replication of the measurements, or reproduction of the figures or other representations of the data?
    • Are all claims made in the manuscript substantiated by the underlying data?

Pensoft journals support the open science approach in the peer review and publication process. We encourage our reviewers to open their identity to the authors and consider supporting the peer review oaths, which tend to be short declarations that reviewers make at the start of their written comments, typically dictating the terms by which they will conduct their reviews (see Aleksic et al. 2015, doi: 10.12688/f1000research.5686.2 for more details):

Principles of the open peer review oath

  • Principle 1: I will sign my name to my review
  • Principle 2: I will review with integrity
  • Principle 3: I will treat the review as a discourse with you; in particular, I will provide constructive criticism
  • Principle 4: I will be an ambassador for the practice of open science

Post-acceptance Procedure

Once your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will receive an invoice for APC charges. Please make sure to provide all the necessary billing details before proceeding to the payment. The payment methods available are: credit card, PayPal, bank transfer. For more details visit the Article Processing Charges section. Please be aware that this journal does not produce PDF proofs as it is based on a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) writing environment. The final version submitted to the journal is published as it is without further modifications.

Data Publishing Guidelines

We strongly encourage and support various strategies and methods for data publication. The preferable way is to store data in internationally recognised data repositories and link back to the data set(s) in the respective article. Data can also be published as supplementary files to the articles, however this should be an exception rather than a rule (see How to publish data). The key to discover, use and cite your data is to include the data references in the reference lists of the articles and always include the DOIs of the data sets, when available, in the citation record. You may read more about this in How to cite data section of the article below. A good example of concise data citation guidelines using DOIs is also available on the GBIF website and on other data repositories.

Darwin Core-structured species occurrence records and observations (primary biodiversity data) should be published with GBIF using either the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) (for which Pensoft maintains an instance, in case such is not available to the authors).  Alternatively, DwC data could also be published in trusted and community-recognised repositories (for example, Atlas of Living Australia, Symbiota,  Arctos or others), however deposition at GBIF should always have a priority over the alternatives. In case a dataset is deposited in more than one repository, the data paper should link to the dataset which is actually described, again with GBIF having a priority over the others.

Authors who want to publish species occurrence data as supplementary files only or through generic repositories (e.g. Zenodo, Dryad), instead of submitting these to GBIF, should justify their decision to do so in a letter to the editors.

For biodiversity and biodiversity-related data the reader may consult the Strategies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity data (Penev et al. 2017, Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e12431. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e12431). For reader's convenience, we list here the hyperlinked table of contents of these extensive guidelines:

The core of the data publishing project of Pensoft is the concept of "Data Paper" developed in a cooperation with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Data Papers are peer-reviewed scholarly publications that describe the published datasets and provide an opportunity to data authors to receive the academic credit for their efforts. Currently, Pensoft offers the opportunity to publish Data Papers describing occurrence data and checklists, Barcode-of-Life genome data and biodiversity-related software tools, such as interactive keys and others.

Examples of data papers

ZooKeys:
Antarctic, Sub-Antarctic and cold temperate echinoid database
A dataset from bottom trawl survey around Taiwan
Project Description: DNA Barcodes of Bird Species in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA
Literature based species occurrence data of birds of northeast India
MOSCHweb — a matrix-based interactive key to the genera of the Palaearctic Tachinidae (Insecta, Diptera)
Amundsen Sea Mollusca from the BIOPEARL II expedition
Iberian Odonata distribution: data of the BOS Arthropod Collection (University of Oviedo, Spain
FORMIDABEL: The Belgian Ants Database
Circumpolar dataset of sequenced specimens of Promachocrinus kerguelensis (Echinodermata, Crinoidea)

PhytoKeys:
Florabank1: a grid-based database on vascular plant distribution in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders and the Brussels Capital region)
Database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN): a community contributed taxonomic checklist of all vascular plants of Canada, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Greenland
Herbarium of Vascular Plants Collection of the University of Extremadura (Spain)

Nature Conservation:
Antarctic macrobenthic communities: A compilation of circumpolar information

Press releases on data papers
New incentive for biodiversity data publishing
Data publishing policies and guidelines for biodiversity data by Pensoft
First database-derived 'data paper' published in journal
A new type of data papers designed to publish online interactive keys
Data paper describes Antarctic biodiversity data gathered by 90 expeditions since 1956
Unique information on Belgian ants compiled and published through FORMIDABEL data paper
Database simplifies finding Canadian plant names and distribution
A synthesis of the 36451 specimens from the UNEX Herbarium in a new data paper


Data Quality Checklist and Recommendations

INTRODUCTION

An empowering aspect of digital data is that they can be merged, reformatted and reused for new, imaginative uses that are more than the sum of their parts. However, this is only possible if data are well curated. To help authors avoid some common mistakes we have created this document to highlight those aspects of data that should be checked before publication.

By "mistakes" we do not mean errors of fact, although these should also be avoided! It is possible to have entirely correct digital data that are low-quality because they are badly structured or formatted, and, therefore, hard or impossible to move from one digital application to another. The next reader of your digital data is likely to be a computer program, not a human. It is essential that your data are structured and formatted so that they are easily processed by that program, and by other programs in the pipeline between you and the next human user of your data.

The following list of recommendations will help you maximise the re-usability of your digital data. Each represents a test carried out by Pensoft when auditing a digital dataset at the request of an author. Following the list, we provide explanations and examples of each recommendation.

Authors are encouraged to perform these checks themselves prior to data publication. For text data, a good text editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors) can be used to find and correct most problems. Spreadsheets usually have some functions for text checking functions, e.g. the "TRIM" function that removes unneeded whitespace from a data item. The most powerful text-checking tools are on the command line, and the website "A Data Cleaner's Cookbook" (https://www.datafix.com.au/cookbook/) is recommended for authors who can use a BASH shell.

When auditing datasets for authors, Pensoft does not check taxonomic or bibliographic details for correctness, but we will do basic geochecks upon request, e.g. test to see if the stated locality is actually at or near the stated latitude/longitude. We also recommend checking that fields do not show "domain schizophrenia", i.e. fields misused to containing data of more than one type.

Proofreading data takes at least as much time and skill as proofreading text. Just as with text, mistakes easily creep into data files unless the files are carefully checked. To avoid the embarrassment of publishing data with such mistakes, we strongly recommend that you take the time to run these basic tests on your data.


CHECKLIST

Characters

  • The dataset is UTF-8 encoded
  • The only characters used that are not numbers, letters or standard punctuation, are tabs and whitespaces
  • Each character has only one encoding in the dataset
  • No line breaks within data items
  • No field-separating character within data items (tab-separated data preferred)
  • No "?" or replacement characters in place of valid characters
  • No Windows carriage returns
  • No leading, trailing, duplicated or unnecessary whitespaces in individual data items

Records

  • No broken records, i.e. records with too few or too many fields
  • No blank records
  • No duplicate records (as defined by context)

Fields

  • No empty fields
  • No evident truncation of data items
  • No unmatched braces within data items
  • No data items with values that are evidently invalid or inappropriate for the given field
  • Repeated data items are consistently formatted
  • Standard data items such as dates and latitude/longitude are consistently formatted
  • No evident disagreement between fields
  • No unexpectedly missing data

RECOMMENDATIONS

Characters 

  • The dataset is UTF-8 encoded

Computer programs do not "read" characters like "A" and "4". Instead, they read strings of 0's and 1's and interpret these strings as characters according to an encoding scheme. The most universal encoding scheme is called UTF-8 and is based on the character set called Unicode. Text data should always be shared with UTF-8 encoding, as errors can be generated when non-UTF-8 encodings (such as Windows-1252) are read by a program expecting UTF-8, and vice-versa. (See also below, on replacement characters). 

  • The only characters used that are not numbers, letters or standard punctuation are tabs and whitespaces

Unusual characters sometimes appear in datasets, especially when databases have been merged. These "control" or "gremlin" characters are sometimes invisible when data are viewed within a particular application (such as a spreadsheet or a database browser) but can usually be revealed when the data are displayed in a text editor. Examples include vertical tab, soft hyphen, non-breaking space and various ASCII control characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character).

  • Each character has only one encoding in the dataset

We have seen individual datasets in which the degree symbol (°) is represented in three different ways, and in which a single quotation mark (') is also represented as a prime symbol, a right single quotation mark and a grave accent. Always use one form of each character, and preferably the simplest form, e.g. plain quotes rather than curly quotes.

  • No line breaks within data items

Spreadsheet and database programs often allow users to have more than one line of text within a data item, separated by linebreaks or carriage returns. When these records are processed, many computer programs understand the embedded linebreak as the end of a record, so that the record is processed as several incomplete records:

item A  itemB1          itemC

               itemB2

becomes:

itemA           itemB1

itemB2          itemC

  • No field-separating character within data items (tab-separated data preferred)

Data are most often compiled in table form, with a particular character used to separate one field ("column") from the next. Depending on the computer program used, the field-separating character might be a comma (CSV files), a tab (TSV files), a semicolon, a pipe (|) etc.

Well-structured data keeps the field-separating character out of data items, to avoid confusion in processing. Because commas are commonly present within data items, and because not all programs understand how to process CSVs, we recommend using tabs as field-separating characters (and avoiding tabs within data items!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab-separated_values.

  • No "?" or replacement characters in place of valid characters

When text data are moved between different character encodings, certain characters can be lost because the receiving program does not understand what the sending program is referring to. In most cases, the lost character is then represented by a question mark, as in "Duméril" becoming "Dum?ril", or by a replacement character, usually a dark polygon with a white question mark inside.

It is important to check for these replacements before publishing data, especially if you converted your data to UTF-8 encoding from another encoding.

  • No Windows carriage returns

On UNIX, Linux and Mac computers, a linebreak is built with just one character, the UNIX linefeed '\n' ('LF'). On Windows computers, a linebreak is created using two characters, one after the other: '\r\n' ('CRLF'), where '\r' is called a 'carriage return' ('CR'). Carriage returns are not necessary in digital data and can cause problems in data processing on non-Windows computers. Check the documentation of the program in which you are compiling data to learn how to remove Windows carriage returns.

  • No leading, trailing, duplicated or unnecessary whitespaces in individual data items

Like "control" and "gremlin" characters, whitespaces are invisible and we pay little attention to them when reading a line of text. Computer programs, however, see whitespaces as characters with the same importance as "A" and "4". For this reason, the following four lines are different and should be edited to make them the same:

Aus bus (Smith, 1900)

   Aus bus (Smith, 1900)

Aus bus (Smith,   1900)

Aus  bus   (Smith, 1900  )

 Records

  • No broken records, i.e. records with too few or too many fields

If a data table contains records with, for example, 25 fields, then every record in the table should have exactly 25 data items, even if those items are empty. Records with too few fields are often the result of a linebreak or field separator within a data item (see above). Records with too many fields also sometimes appear when part of a record has been moved in a spreadsheet past the end of the table.

  • No blank records

Blank records contribute nothing to a data table because they contain no information, and a tidy data table has no blank lines. Note, however, that a computer program looking for blank lines may not find what looks to a human like a blank line, because the "blank" line actually contains invisible tabs or whitespaces.

  • No duplicate records (as defined by context)

It can be difficult to find duplicate records in some datasets, but our experience is that they are not uncommon. One cause of duplicates is database software assigning a unique ID number to the same line of data more than once. Context will determine whether one record is a duplicate of another, and data compilers are best qualified to look for them.

 Fields

  • No empty fields

 Fields containing no data items do not add anything to the information content of a dataset and should be omitted.

  •  No evident truncation of data items

The end of a data item is sometimes cut off, for example when a data item with 55 characters is entered into a database field with a 50-character maximum limit. Truncated data items should be repaired when found, e.g.

Smith & Jones in Smith, Jones and Bro

repaired to:

Smith & Jones in Smith, Jones and Brown, 1974

  • No unmatched braces within data items

These are surprisingly common in datasets and are either data entry errors or truncations, e.g.

Smith, A. (1900 A new species of Aus. Zool. Anz. 23: 660-667.

5 km W of Traralgon (Vic

  • No data items with values that are evidently invalid or inappropriate for the given field

For example, a field labelled "Year" and containing years should not contain the data item "3 males".

  •  Repeated data items are consistently formatted

The same data item should not vary in format within a single dataset, e.g.

Smith, A. (1900) A new species of Aus. Zool. Anz. 23: 660-667.

Smith, A. 1900. A new species of Aus. Zoologischer Anzeiger 23: 660-667.

Smith, A. (1900) A new species of Aus. Zool. Anz. 23, 660-667, pl. ix.

  • Standard data items such as dates and latitude/longitude are consistently formatted

Data compilers have a number of choices when formatting standard data items, but whichever format is chosen, it should be used consistently. A single date field should not, for example, have dates represented as 2005-05-17, May 19, 2005 and 23.v.2005.

  • No evident disagreement between fields

If there are fields which contain linked information then these fields should be checked to ensure that they do not conflict with each other. For example, the year or an observation cannot be after the year it was published. Examples:

Year            Citation

1968            Smith, A. (1966) Polychaete anatomy. Academic Press, New York; 396 pp.

 

Genus           Subgenus

Aus             Bus (Aus)

  • No unexpectedly missing data

This is a rare issue in datasets that have been audited, but occasionally occurs. An example is the Darwin Core "verbatimLocality" field for a record containing a full latitude and longitude, but with the "decimalLatitude" and "decimalLongitude" fields blank.

  • Spelling of Darwin Core terms

Darwin Core terms are usually considered case sensitive, therefore you should use their correct spelling (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/).

We thank Dr. Robert Mesibov for preparing the Data Quality Checklist draft and Dr. Quentin Groom for reviewing it.


For Editors and Reviewers


Guidelines for Editors


How to Access a Manuscript

Manuscripts can be accessed after login

  1. Login is possible after registration at the journal's website. Our Editorial Office will register all first-time editors and reviewers. New users will receive an automated notification with a request to confirm registration and account information, and options for setting a password, email alerts and other features.  
    Note: All users can use their registration details to login in all three (Book, E-Book and the respective Journal) platforms of www.pensoft.net.
    Note: Please remember that you may have registered with two or more different email addresses, that is why you may have more than one valid account at www.pensoft.net. We advise using only one email address, hence one password associated with it, for all your operations at www.pensoft.net. We highly recommend that in case the user has two or more different accounts, to merge these through the user's profile.

Note: The users can at any time change the initially set password and correct personal details using their user's profile menu (by clicking on the user's name in the upper right corner of the screen appearing after login).

  1. If you have forgotten your password, please use the function Forgot your password? or write to request it from journals@pensoft.net.

There are two ways to access a manuscript

  1. After login, please go to the respective journal’s web page and click on My Tasks button in the upper right corner of the screen. This way, you will be able to see all manuscripts you are responsible for as an author or reviewer or editor.

    Note: The manuscripts are grouped by categories, e.g., In Review (no.), In layout (no.), Published (no.), and Archived (no.) etc. The number in brackets after each category shows the number of manuscripts that were assigned to you.

  2. Click on the active manuscript link provided in the email notification you have received from the online editorial system. The link will lead you directly to the manuscript.


General Responsibilities of Editors

Subject, or Associate, editors in Pensoft’s journals carry the main responsibility for the scientific quality of the papers. They take the final decision on a manuscript’s acceptance or rejection and their names are listed as Academic Editor in the header of each published article.

The editorial process is facilitated through an online editorial system and a set of email notifications. The online editorial system informs the Subject Editor about any change in the status of a manuscript from submission to publication.

The online editorial system is designed to save time and effort for Subject Editors in checking the status of the manuscripts. There is no need for editors to visit the journal’s website to keep track on the manuscript they are responsible for. The online system will inform the Subject Editor when an invited reviewer has accepted or declined to review. The email notifications contain stepwise instructions what action is needed at each stage, as well as a link to the respective manuscript (accessible by clicking on the link in the email notification or after login – see How to Access a Manuscript).

Subject Editors are not expected to provide a thorough linguistic editing or copyediting of a manuscript, but rather focus on its scientific quality and overall style, which should correspond to good practices in clear and concise academic writing. It is the author’s responsibility to submit the manuscript in linguistically and grammatically correct English. The Subject Editor should not hesitate to recommend either Reject, or Reject, but resubmission encouraged PRIOR to the peer-review process, in cases when a manuscript is scientifically poor and/or does not conform to journal’s style, and/or is written in poor English (see Note under point 1 below how to reject a manuscript prior to peer review). 

Editors-in-Chief, Managing Editors or their deputies are allowed to publish a limited proportion of papers per year co-authored by them, after considering some extra precautions to avoid an impression of impropriety, endogeny, conflicts of interest and ensure that the editorial decision-making process is transparent and fair.

It often happens that even carefully written manuscripts may contain small errors in orthography or stylistics. We shall be thankful if editors spot such errors during the reading process and correct them.


Stepwise Description of the Editorial Process

  1. Once a manuscript is submitted, the Managing Editor (or the Editor-in-Chief) briefly checks the manuscript for any personal notes addressed to the E-i-C during the submission process, any explicitly indicated conflict of interest or request for additional services or discount and then the Editor can process it for review.
    Note: The workflow that the journal uses allows the Managing Editor (or the Editor-in-Chief) to perform a thorough initial check of the manuscript, during a previous stage called Technical evaluation, prior to its submission to the journal. During this stage the Editor checks the manuscript for conformance with the journal's Focus, Scope, Policies and style requirements and decides whether it is potentially suitable for publication and can be processed for review. In case the submission does not comply with the journal's standards, it can be either 1) sent back to the authors for correction - this process can be iterated in as many rounds as needed - or 2) rejected in ARPHA, i.e. disabled for submission to the journal. Either way, the system requires that the Editorial office add a note explaining the reason for return or rejection.

  2. Once a manuscript has been approved during the Technical evaluation and then submitted to the journal, the Managing Editor (or the Editor-in-Chief) assigns it to the Subject Editor responsible for the respective topic (e.g., science branch or taxon). The Subject Editor receives a notification email on the assignment.  
    Note: The link to the respective manuscript is available in the review request email and all consequent reminder emails. The manuscript is accessible by clicking on the link in the email notifications, or via the user's dashboard after login. Please see How to Access a Manuscript above in case you have any difficulties.

  3. The Subject Editor has to read the manuscript and decide whether it is potentially suitable for publication and can be processed for review, or rejected immediately, or returned to the author for improvement and re-submission. Reasons for rejection can be a low scientific quality, non-conformance to the journal’s style/policies, and/or linguistically or grammatically poor English language.
    Note: There are two ways to reject a manuscript prior to review process:
    -  Through the buttons Reject or Reject, but re-submission encouraged in the Editorial tab. Please note, however, that the buttons will be made active only after a justification for the rejection is provided in the text field. 
    -  Through an email to the Editorial office explaining the reason for rejection. The manuscript will be then rejected/returned through the online editorial system and the respective notification email will be sent from the Editorial Office.

  4. In case the manuscript is acceptable for peer review, the Subject Editor has to invite reviewers by clicking on the Invite reviewers link. A list of reviewers will appear from which the editor can choose the appropriate ones or add new.
    Note: "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers. The difference between "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers is that "Nominated" reviewers are expected to provide a formal review by the deadline; "Panel" reviewers are invited but not required to evaluate the manuscript. Both "Nominated" and "Panel" reviewers can propose changes and corrections, and make comments in the manuscript online and submit a concise reviewer's form. 

  5. Once reviewers are chosen, the Subject Editor has to click the Invite reviewers green button at the end of the page which will generate emails templates with review invitations. It is highly recommended that the Subject Editor adds some personal words above the standard email text review invitation.

  6. In case a reviewer is absent from our users' data base, the editor can add his/her name and email through the Add new reviewer link, which will appear once the search field reveal no results. It is possible that the needed reviewer has already been registered in the Pensoft database either as customer or author/reviewer of another journal. If this is the case, then his/her name, affiliation and other metadata will automatically appear once the e-mail field is populated in the Create user online form.

  7. The Subject Editor receives a notification email if the reviewer has agreed to review a manuscript or declined to do that. The editor takes care to appoint additional reviewers in case some of the invited reviewers have declined.

  8. Once all reviewers submit their reviews, the Subject Editor receives an email notification, inviting him/her to consider reviewers' opinions, read through the manuscript and make a decision through the Proceed button. The Subject Editor is also notified in case none of the reviewers agreed to provide a formal review on the manuscript and he/she is prompted to consider inviting more reviewers.
    Note: Editorial comments should be added in the online editorial form; comments and corrections applied using the Track Changes feature and these will be consolidated in a single document along with all reviewers' comments and suggestions.

  9. At this stage, the editor should make a decision either to (1) accept the manuscript, or (2) reject it, or (3) initiate another review round. In case the manuscript is not rejected, but recommended for Minor Revision, Major Revision, or Acceptance, the author is expected to submit a revised version within a certain period of time and the Subject Editor will be notified by email about that.
    Note 1: Authors must submit revised versions using the Track Changes feature and resolve all Comments, replying to each Subject Editor and reviewer's query so that the Subject Editor can see their corrections/additions. Authors are expected to reply to the essential critiques and comments of reviewers separately through the online editorial system.
    Note 2: During the second, or next, review round, the Subject Editor may decide to ask reviewers to evaluate the revised version of the manuscript. He/she may also make a decision based on the author’s responses and the revised version of the manuscript without asking additional reviewers' support.

  10. After acceptance, the manuscript will go to layout and proofreading. The Subject Editor will be notified by email when the final proof is uploaded on the journal’s website. The Subject Editor is expected to look at the proofs and notify the Editorial Office through email in case the proofs need improvement.

  11. The Subject Editor may always access information on the manuscripts which have been edited by him/her through the menu My Tasks –> Subject Editor on the journal’s web page – In Review (no.), In Edit (no.), Published (no.), and Archived (no.). The number in brackets after each category shows the number of manuscripts that were assigned.


Editors’ and Reviewers’ Workload Stats

While selecting a Reviewer or a Subject Editor to assign to a manuscript, Editors can access the current and past workload for the person they are considering.

By clicking on the user’s name, an Editor sees how many editorial or review tasks the person is currently assigned with, as well as a record of the user’s previous performance across all ARPHA-hosted journals (i.e. number of accepted and declined editorial and review assignments, as well as the titles of the corresponding journals).

The feature is meant to facilitate and expedite the editorial process by discouraging assignment of tasks to overburdened or inactive users.

Find how to Manage Subject editor assignments and Invite Reviewers in the ARPHA Manual.


Review Quality Rating

Subject Editors should evaluate each review submitted to a manuscript they are handling by using a 5-star rating system. The average score is visible for Subject editors who consider the user as a Reviewer. The feature is meant to expedite the editorial process by aiding Subject Editors in the selection of the most suitable reviewers.

Find how to Rate a peer review in the ARPHA Manual.


Guidelines for Reviewers

Pensoft journals support the open science approach in the peer review and publication process. We encourage our reviewers to open their identity to the authors and consider supporting the peer review oaths, which tend to be short declarations that reviewers make at the start of their written comments, typically dictating the terms by which they will conduct their reviews (see Aleksic et al. 2015, doi: 10.12688/f1000research.5686.2 for more details):

Principles of the open peer-review oath

  • Principle 1: I will sign my name to my review
  • Principle 2: I will review with integrity
  • Principle 3: I will treat the review as a discourse with you; in particular, I will provide constructive criticism
  • Principle 4: I will be an ambassador for the practice of open science

How to Access a Manuscript

Manuscripts can be accessed after login

  1. Login is possible after registration at the journal's website. Our Editorial Office will register all first-time editors and reviewers. New users will receive an automated notification with a request to confirm registration and account information, and options for setting a password, email alerts and other features.  
    Note: All users can use their registration details to login in all three (Book, E-Book and the respective Journal) platforms of www.pensoft.net.
    Note: Please remember that you may have registered with two or more different email addresses, that is why you may have more than one valid account at www.pensoft.net. We advise using only one email address, hence one password associated with it, for all your operations at www.pensoft.net. We highly recommend that, in case the user has two or more different accounts, to merge these through user's profile.  
    Note: Users can at any time change the initially set password and correct personal details using their user's profile menu (by clicking on the user's name in the upper right corner of the screen appearing after login).
  2. If you have forgotten your password, please use the function Forgot your password? or write to request it from journals@pensoft.net.

There are two ways to access a manuscript

  1. After login, please go to the respective journal’s web page and click on My Tasks button in the upper right corner of the screen. This way, you will be able to see all manuscripts you are responsible for as Author or Reviewer or Subject Editor.

    Note: The manuscripts are grouped by categories, e.g., In Review (no.), In layout (no.), Published (no.), and Archived (no.) etc. The number in brackets after each category shows the number of manuscripts assigned to you.

  2. Click on the active manuscript link provided in the email notification you have received from the online editorial system. The link will lead you directly to the manuscript.


General Responsibilities of Reviewers

This journal uses a single-blind peer review process. The reviewers are encouraged to disclose their identity, if they wish so. The peer review and editorial process is facilitated through an online editorial system and a set of email notifications. The online editorial system sends the Reviewer a review request, initiated by the Subject Editor or the Editorial Office. The online system will also inform about delays in the reviewing and will confirm a successful review submission. The email notifications contain stepwise instructions about the actions needed at each stage along with the link to the respective manuscript (accessible only after login – see section How to Access a Manuscript).

Reviewers are not expected to provide a thorough linguistic editing or copyediting of a manuscript, but rather focus on its scientific quality and overall style, which should correspond to the good practices in clear and concise academic writing. If Reviewers recognize that a manuscript requires linguistic edits, we shall be grateful for them to inform both the Author and the Subject Editor in the report. It is the Author’s responsibility to submit the manuscript in linguistically and grammatically correct English.

It often happens that even carefully written manuscripts may contain small errors in orthography or stylistics. We shall be thankful if Reviewers spot such errors during the reading process and correct them.

The manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or three experts with the aim of reaching a first decision as soon as possible. Reviewers do not need to sign their reports, but are welcome to do so. They are also asked to declare any conflicts of interest.

Reviewers are asked whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, how interesting it is and whether the quality of the writing is acceptable. Where possible, the final decision is made on the basis of the peer reviews. In cases of strong disagreement between the reports or between the authors and peer reviewers, the editor can assess these according to his/her expertise or seek advice from a member of the journal's Editorial Board.

The ultimate responsibility for editorial decisions lies with the respective Subject Editor and/or, in some journals, with the Editor-in-Chief. All appeals should be directed to the Editor-in-Chief, who may decide to seek advice from the Subject Editors or the Editorial Board.

Reviewers are also asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles may be given greater prominence and greater external publicity, including press releases addressed to science journalists and mass media.

During a second review round, reviewers may be asked to evaluate the revised version against their recommendations submitted during the first review round.

Reviewers are kindly asked to be polite and constructive in their reports. Reports that may be insulting or uninformative will be rescinded.

Reviewers are asked to start their report with a very brief summary of the reviewed paper. This will help the editor and the authors see whether the reviewer correctly understood the paper or whether a report might be based on misunderstanding.

Furthermore, reviewers are also asked to comment on originality, structure and previous research:

Originality: Is the paper sufficiently novel and does it contribute to a better understanding of the topic under scrutiny? Is the work rather confirmatory and repetitive?

Structure: Is the introduction clear and concise? Does it place the work into the context that is necessary for a reader to comprehend aims, hypotheses tested, experimental design or methods? Are Material and Methods clearly described and sufficiently explained? Are reasons given when choosing one method over another one from a set of comparable methods? Are the results clearly, but concisely described? Do they relate to the topic outlined in the introduction? Do they follow a logical sequence? Does the discussion place the paper in scientific context and go a step beyond the current scientific knowledge on the basis of the results? Are competing hypotheses or theories reasonably related to each other and properly discussed? Do the conclusions seem reasonable?

Previous research: Is previous research adequately incorporated into the paper? Are references complete, necessary and accurate? Is there any sign that substantial parts of the paper are copies of other works?


Stepwise Description of the Peer Review Process

  1. This journal uses a single-blind peer review process. Notwithstanding with that, the reviewers are encouraged to disclose their identities, if they wish to do so. 

  2. The Reviewer receives a review request generated by the Subject Editor or the Editorial Office and is expected to either agree to provide a review, or decline, through pressing the Will do the review or Unable to do the review link in the online editorial system. In case the Reviewer agrees to review the manuscript, he/she should submit the review within a certain time frame, which may vary in the different journals.
    Note: The link to the respective manuscript is available in the review request email and all consequent reminder emails. The manuscript is accessible by clicking on the link in the email notification, or after login. Please look at the section How to Access a Manuscript above in case you have any difficulties.

  3. The review should be submitted through the Proceed button. The review should consist of (1) a simple online questionnaire to be answered by ticking either YesNo, or N/A; and (2) comments addressed to both the Author and the Editor in the online form.
    Note: Reviewers can insert comments in the manuscript review version.

  4. The Reviewer may decide to stay anonymous or open his/her identity by ticking the Show my name to the author(s) box at the bottom of the reviewer’s form.

  5. The review process is completed by selecting a recommendation from five options: (1) Reject; (2) Reject, but resubmission encouraged; (3) Major Revision; (4) Minor Revision; (5) Accept. The system will ask for one more confirmation of the selected recommendation before submission. The submitted review cannot be changed after submission.
    Note: Reasons for rejection can be a low scientific quality, non-conformance to the journal’s style/policies, and/or grammatically poor English language.

  6. Once a Reviewer submits a review of a manuscript, he/she receives an acknowledgement email from the journal.

  7. The submission of the review is also automatically reported to Clarivate - Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service (formerly Publons). Reviewers are asked to confirm whether they want their reviews to be recorded on Clarivate.

  8. When all Reviewers have submitted their reviews, the Subject Editor makes a decision to either accept, reject or request further minor/major revision.

  9. After Subject Editor's decision, the manuscript is sent back to the author for comments and further revision. The author needs to submit a revised version in due time.

  10. Reviewers are notified via email when the revised version of a manuscript they have reviewed is submitted by the author. They receive a link to the revised version along with the editorial decision and all reviews of the manuscript. Reviewers are also provided with a feedback form should they have any comments on the revised version.

  11. When an article is published, all Reviewers who have provided a review for the respective manuscript receive an email acknowledgement. In the email, there is a link to view/download the published article.

  12. The Reviewer may always access information on the manuscripts that are being / have been reviewed by him/her through the menu My Tasks –> Reviewer on the journal’s web page – In Review (no.), In Edit (no.), Published (no.), and Archived (no.). The number in brackets after each category shows the number of manuscripts that have been assigned to you.


Benefits for Editors and Reviewers

This journal does not exclude editors from publishing papers in the journal (co-)authored by them. However, this is only possible for a limited proportion of papers per year, with some extra precautions and procedures to avoid an impression of impropriety, endogeny or conflicts of interest, and to ensure the editorial decision-making process is transparent and fair. For more information please consult the Policies page on the journal's website.

Pensoft editors and reviewers are entitled to a set of benefits in appreciation for their contribution to the quality of the works we publish. Please make sure to apply for your discount prior to the manuscript submission.

For Editors

For Reviewers

  • 15% unconditional discount on APCs and reprints for the journal in which you are an editor. Valid in cases where at least one paper has been handled within the last 12 months and the editor is the senior or corresponding author of the paper subject to the discount.
  • 10% unconditional discount on all books published by Pensoft.
  • 15% discount on APCs for the journal in which the review was provided. Valid in cases where the reviewer is the senior or corresponding author of the paper subject to the discount.
    • Valid for one manuscript per review, submitted within 12 months of the review
  • Automated registration of reviews at Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service (formerly Publons) after confirmation by the reviewer.
  • Open reviews are provided with DOIs and citation details.

* When an individual qualifies for multiple discounts Pensoft will use the largest that applies.

  Apply to become editor via Editor Application Form

Topical collections

Topical collections are collections of articles grouped together by a shared topic or interest group, such as an emerging area of research, proceedings of a conference, outcomes of a research project or a Festschrift volume.

Article collections aim to aid the dissemination and outreach of multiple research outcomes and also bring together research teams from around the globe working on similar topics, thus increasing the opportunities for collaboration, sharing and re-use of research. Article collections bring credit, increased discoverability, visibility and recognition to both their collection editors and participating authors.

Topical collections can be opened in any journal hosted on ARPHA and can be permanent or made subject to a submission deadline. It is only up to the Collection editor(s) to decide whether and when the collection is to be closed for submission (given a timely public announcement is provided). The articles are published on a rolling basis, as soon as they are ready for publication, and can be part of different journal issues, published across many years.

Article collections are managed by a Collection editor and associated Guest editors. To pitch a Topical collection, either contact the Editor-in-Chief or submit an Open an article collection proposal form. Before pitching a Topical collection, please make yourself aware of the specificity of the focus, scope and policies of the journal and the associated responsibilities and benefits for you as a Collection editor.


How It Works

The following guidelines apply for Topical collections in the ARPHA journals.

  1. Article collections can be opened in any of the ARPHA-hosted journals. It is subject to the journal's policy, however, to offer this feature or not. 

  2. Collections may have subcollections, for example, topical subcollections. A subcollection cannot be managed separately from the parent collection, except in the case of conference proceedings submission workflows available at some ARPHA-hosted journals.

  3. Opening and managing a collection

    1. The article collections are managed by a Collection editor and Guest editors. The Collection editor is responsible for approving or declining manuscripts submitted to the article collection; assigning a Guest editor to each manuscript for handling the peer review process; and managing the collection on the journal’s website (e.g. change the collection’s description or the order of the papers). The Collection editor has the full rights of a Guest editor and can also handle manuscripts.

    2. Before pitching a collection, assure that you are ready to appoint other Guest editors, if necessary. The Collection editor and the Guest editors are also expected to commission an initial set of manuscripts to be submitted soon after the opening of the collection.

    3. Submit the Article collection proposal form or contact the Editor-in-Chief via email. The collections should fully comply with the journal’s focus, scope and editorial policies.

    4. Online proposals are forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief and to the journal’s editorial office for approval. The editorial office checks and confirms the guest editors' credentials.

    5. Upon approval of the proposal, the journal’s editorial office will set up the collection on the journal’s website.

    6. Open collections will be promoted through the journal’s website and social media in collaboration with the Collection and Guest editors. 

    7. Editors of Topical collections with no set submission deadlines need to inform the journal’s editorial office if they wish to close the collection for submissions in a timely manner. 

  4. Authors opt for assigning their manuscript to a collection during submission. In case the manuscript is declined from the collection, it undergoes the regular evaluation and peer review process at the journal.

  5. Once the manuscript passes the initial pre-review screening by the Editor-in-Chief and the journal's editorial office, it is forwarded to the Collection editor to either approve or decline it for the collection. The Collection editor is notified about each new submission to the collection via email sent by the system.

  6. After reading the paper, the Collection editor can:

    1. accept it in the collection and assign it to a Guest editor.

    2. decline it from the collection and send it back to the journal's editorial office.

  7. Once a manuscript is assigned to a Guest editor, he or she takes on the responsibility to invite reviewers and provide an editorial decision for revision, rejection or acceptance of the manuscript, based on the reviews and personal evaluation. Papers submitted by the guest editor(s) must be handled under an independent review process and make up no more than 25% of the collection's total.

  8. The editorial decisions are automatically forwarded to the authors by the system.

  9. The guest editors are overseen by the journal's Editor-in-Chief and/or dedicated board members, and may intervene in the editorial process. Depending on the journal’s policy, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief might need to approve the Guest editor’s final decision before the manuscript is accepted for publication.


Benefits of Editing a Collection

The main advantages to open and edit an article collection can be summarised as follows:

  1. Credit and recognition for the Collection and Guest editors who take care to organise and manage the article collection.

  2. Facilitates discoverability and usability of topically related studies, which in turn benefits both authors and readers.

  3. Increases the visibility of related papers, even when papers might otherwise lack in viewership. 

  4. Prompts simultaneous citation of multiple articles related to a certain subject.

  5. Facilitates citation and referencing of the whole issue as a complete entity.

To show our gratitude to the collection editors, we are also providing a free publication to collection editors in the collection they edit and manage.


Editor’s Responsibilities

By proposing an article collection (Topical collection), you agree to act as a Collection editor, whose main responsibilities are:

  • Working with the editorial office to set up the article collection on the journal’s website.

  • Appoint Guest editors for the article collection.

  • Approve or decline each manuscript submitted to the article collection.

  • Assign a Guest editor for each manuscript submitted to the article collection.

  • Assure that the article collections complies with any relevant requirements, as set up by the journal and the agreement (if any).

  • Inform the journal’s editorial office about any changes or issues concerning the management of the collection in due time.

You will also be granted the user rights of a Guest editor necessary to handle manuscripts in the system (i.e. assign reviewers and provide an editorial decision on the acceptance/rejection of the manuscript). 

The responsibilities of a Guest editor are:

  • Handling the peer review of the manuscripts they have been assigned to.

  • Making an editorial decision for revision, acceptance or rejection of the manuscripts they have been assigned to, based on the reviews provided and personal evaluation.

  • Taking into consideration the recommendations of the journal’s Editor-in-Chief.

For more information about the editorial workflow, visit How it works?


Article Processing Charges

Core services included in our Article Processing Charges:

  • Manuscript authoring in the ARPHA Writing Tool
  • Online collaboration with your co-authors and peers during authoring
  • Online search and import of cited references and data from CrossRef, DataCite, PubMed, RefBank, GNUB, and Mendeley
  • Automated technical check for consistency of the manuscript
  • Pre-submission technical and editorial checks by the editorial office
  • Pre-submission peer review, organized by the author (optional)
  • Pre-publication peer review
  • Community-driven post-publication peer review (optional)
  • Automated registration of peer reviews at Clarivate (formerly Publons)
  • Publication in semantically enhanced HTML, PDF and JATS XML formats
  • Machine-readable, harvestable content via JATS XML and Web services
  • Archiving in trusted international repositories
  • Active dissemination via social networks and email alerts

 Please note that the charges below are applicable for all manuscripts submitted after 1st of February 2022.

Article type

Size limits*

Article processing charges

Character count including spaces

Editorial

20,000

By invitation only

Corrigendum**

20,000

€  100

All other

40,000

€  550 + €  10 for each 1000 characters above 40,000

* Manuscripts that exceed the indicated character count would incur an additional charge. Please ask for a quote for manuscripts that exceed the indicated limit more than two times.

** Corrigenda to papers published in this journal only.

Please note that the above prices do not include VAT (Value Added Tax). VAT is applicable only for VAT non-registered customers based within the European Union. To avoid charging VAT, the EU companies or persons should provide their VAT registration numbers validated with the EU taxation database (https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/).


Publisher's statement

A key policy and strategic aim of Pensoft is to provide high-quality and inclusive publishing services at highly competitive and affordable Article Processing Charges (APCs) or for free through its diamond open access journals. See Pensoft’s journal portfolio here.

In order to ensure long-term sustainability of the journals and cover the cost of the associated in-house publishing services, our journals require Article Processing Charges (APCs). These charges apply only after a submitted manuscript is accepted for publication, and may be partially or fully covered by institutional funds to reduce financial burdens on authors of research.

Pensoft strongly supports measures that ensure an inclusive and FAIR publishing environment, which in turn prompts quality, sustainability and reasonable pricing in scholarly publishing. You can find more about the publisher’s view on quality, transparency, openness and equity in scholarly publishing in Pensoft’s official statement, prompted by the publication of the European Union’s Conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing

In compliance with the Plan S requirements, Pensoft provides a breakdown of the APC following the guidelines by the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA). The report on the journal’s APC is submitted on a yearly basis to the Journal Comparison Service by Coalition S and the detailed breakdown is available to the participating funding institutions on the platform.

Authors who are unable to pay their APCs for several reasons, should consult the Journal’s Discounts and Waivers page, use the diamond open-access journals (free to publish and free to read) hosted on Pensoft’s ARPHA Publishing Platform, or contact the journal’s Editor-in-Chief directly. 


Special Issues

Article collections enable conference organizers or project coordinators to publish a number of articles under a common theme and editorship. Depending on the number of articles to be included, Pensoft offers discounts on APCs as described in the table below.

 

Small

Medium

Large

Number of articles

< 10

10 – 20

21 +

Discount on APCs

5%

10%

15%

PR campaign

By agreement

By agreement

Included

Institutional branding

By agreement

By agreement

Included

We are happy to discuss alternative arrangements if there is a better way to suit your needs for n article collection. Please do not hesitate to contact us or to submit your proposal through the article collection application form.


Additional Services (Optional)

Optional service

Price

Notes

Linguistic services

€ 15 per 1800 characters

For texts that require additional English language editing

Tailored PR campaign

€ 150*

Press release, dedicated media and social networks promotion

Paper reprints

At cost

On demand

Auditing of the Darwin Core data associated with manuscript**

€ 75 for datasets up to 10000 records. For large datasets (10,000 + records) please contact Dr. Bob Mesibov for pricing

On demand

Cleaning of the Darwin Core data associated with my manuscript**

€ 225 for datasets up to 10000 records. For large datasets (10,000 + records) please contact Dr. Bob Mesibov for pricing

On demand

Scientific illustrations & image processing to complement articles ask for a quote contacting Pensoft Publishers at designer@pensoft.net On demand

*This service can be discounted or waived for articles of outstanding importance for the science and society.
**Pensoft reviewers do not usually have time to check through large data files included with manuscripts. If you would like us to have your data files checked, we offer the services of Pensoft editor Dr Bob Mesibov, who is also a data auditor.
Suitable data files for checking would be large tables of occurrence records or of genetic data. These can be checked for duplicate and broken records, misuse of fields, disagreements between fields, character encoding problems and incorrect or inconsistent formatting. Georeferencing can also be checked, on request. Please note that this service does not apply to taxonomic, nomenclatural or bibliographic details in data files.


Discounts and Waivers

Please note that the discounts and waivers policy below is applicable for all manuscripts submitted after 1st of January 2024.

Authors can apply for a discount or a waiver during manuscript submission if they comply with the conditions listed below. The journal will not consider requests made during the review process or after acceptance. Formal letters to the editors will not be considered outside the application process during manuscript submission. The waiver system will be managed by administrative staff not involved in decisions regarding article acceptance. We ask authors not to discuss any issues concerning payment with editors.

  • Discount of 10 % is offered to:
    • Scientists working privately, not affiliated with an institution.
    • Graduate and PhD students if they are first authors of a manuscript. 
  • Discount of 15 % is offered to:
    • Scientists affiliated with institutions located in Research4Life Group B countries (https://www.research4life.org/access/eligibility/#groupb) if they are lead or corresponding authors of a manuscript. In cases of multiple affiliations, all institutions should be located in eligible countries. 
  • Discounts are also offered to our editors and reviewers, for more information see here
  • Special discounts can be requested by the authors of extensive review papers and monographs.
  • Waivers (once per year per (co-) author for manuscripts no larger than 10 printed pages, or for the first 10 pages of a larger manuscript) are offered to:
    • Retired scientists who are editors or active reviewers for this journal (1-3 reviews provided in the year before the manuscript submission). 
    • Scientists affiliated with institutions located in Research4Life Group A countries (https://www.research4life.org/access/eligibility/#groupa), if they are lead or corresponding authors of a manuscript. In cases of multiple affiliations, all institutions should be located in eligible countries.

The journal offers also various institutional programs and membership plans to support Open Access scientific publishing. To be eligible, the author must be a corresponding author affiliated with the institution or agency.

Discounts and waivers do not accumulate.

Please note that the discounts and waivers policy below is applicable for all manuscripts submitted before 1st of January 2024.

Authors can apply for discount or waiver during manuscript submission if they comply with the conditions listed below. The journal will not consider requests made during the review process or after acceptance. Formal letters to the editors will not be considered outside the application process during manuscript submission.

  • Discount of 10 % is offered to:
    • Scientists working privately, not affiliated with an institution.
    • Graduate and PhD students if they are first authors of a manuscript. 
    • Scientists living and working in lower middle-income countries (http://data.worldbank.org/income-level/lower-middle-income) if they are sole authors of a manuscript, or authors' research is funded primarily (50% or more of the work contained within the article) by an institution or organization from the eligible countries. 
  • Discounts are also offered to our editors and reviewers, for more information see here
  • Special discounts can be requested by the authors of extensive review papers and monographs.
  • Waivers (once per year per (co-) author for manuscripts no larger than 10 printed pages, or for the first 10 pages of a larger manuscript) are offered to:
    • Retired scientists who are editors or active reviewers for this journal (1-3 reviews provided in the year before the manuscript submission). 
    • Scientists living and working in low-income countries (http://data.worldbank.org/income-level/low-income), if they are sole authors of a manuscript, or authors' research is funded primarily (50% or more of the work contained within the article) by an institution or organization from the eligible countries.

The journal offers also various institutional programs and membership plans to support Open Access scientific publishing. To be eligible, the author must be a corresponding author affiliated with the institution or agency.

Discounts and waivers do not accumulate.


Science Communication

Our journal and the PR team at Pensoft invites authors to contribute to the communication and promotion of their published research, thereby increasing the visibility, outreach and impact of their work. 

Authors are welcome to notify us whenever their institution is working on a promotional campaign about their work published in our journal. We are always happy to reshare and/or repost (where appropriate). 

You can contact our PR team at dissemination@pensoft.net to discuss the communication and promotion of your research.


Tailored PR Campaign

(Paid service*)

We encourage authors, who feel that their work is of particular interest to the wider audience, to email us with a press release draft** (see template and guidelines), outlining the key findings from the study and their public impact. Then, the PR team will work with them to finalise the announcement that will be:

  • Issued on the global science news service Eurekalert!
  • Sent out to our media contacts from the world’s top-tier news outlets
  • Posted on ARPHA’s or Pensoft’s blog
  • Shared on social media via suitable ARPHA-managed accounts

Following the distribution of the press announcement, our team will be tracking the publicity across news media, blogs and social networks, in order to report back to the author(s), and reshare any prominent media content.

Request our Tailored PR campaign service by selecting it while completing your submission form and you will be contacted once your manuscript is accepted for publication. Alternatively, contact our PR team  (dissemination@pensoft.net), preferably upon the acceptance of your manuscript.

* The Tailored PR campaign is an extra service charged at EUR 150. However, we would consider discounts and even full waivers for studies of particular interest for the society.

** Please note that our PR team reserves the right to edit your press release at their discretion. No press announcements will be issued until we receive the author’s final approval to do so. The service is only available for studies published within the past 3 months.


Guest Blog Post

(Free service)

Authors are strongly encouraged to promote their work and its impact on society to the audience beyond their immediate public of fellow scientists by means of storytelling in plain language. Ideally, such guest blog posts will be:

  • Written from the author’s own point of view, using conversational tone;
  • Written in fluent English;
  • Presenting some curious background information, in order to place the discovery in context;
  • Including attractive non-copyright imagery.

Request our Guest blog post service by contacting the PR department (dissemination@pensoft.net), regardless of the status of your submission, as there are no time constraints for guest blog post publication. Particularly encouraged are follow-up contributions telling the story of, for example, a research paper that has led to an important policy to be set in place; or an article that has met remarkable attention or reactions in the public sphere.

Following the necessary final touches to the guest blog post by the PR team, the contribution will be:

  • Posted on ARPHA’s or Pensoft’s blog
  • Shared on social media via multiple and relevant ARPHA-managed accounts

Please note that the PR team reserves the right to refuse publication of a guest blog post on the occasion that it is provided in poor English, uses considerable amount of jargon or does not abide by basic ethical standards. Our PR team reserves the right to request changes to the text related to formatting or language. No blog posts will be issued until we receive the author’s final approval to do so.

Find past guest blog posts on Pensoft’s blog here


Video Podcast

(Free service)

To efficiently increase the outreach of their research, authors are suggested to prepare a video contribution (i.e. elevator video pitch, video abstract or topical video), where they present their work to an audience beyond their immediate public of fellow scientists by means of visual storytelling.

To do so, they are expected to send us a short (up to 02’00’’) video clip, presenting their study in a nutshell, in order to spark the viewer’s further interest in their findings and work, as well as the research topic as a whole. Ideally, such contribution will be:

  • filmed in high quality, preferably with .mp4 file extension with the H.264 video codec;
  • directed from the author’s own point of view, using conversational tone and minimal jargon;
  • presented in fluent English or featuring English subtitles;
  • accompanied by a transcript in English;
  • accompanied by a short text introduction for the purposes of a blog post.

Request our Guest video contribution service by contacting the PR department (dissemination@pensoft.net), regardless of the status of your submission, since there are no time constraints for guest blog post publication.

Following the necessary final touches to the guest blog post, the contribution will be:

  • Shared on Pensoft’s YouTube channel;
  • Posted on ARPHA’s or Pensoft’s blog;
  • Shared on social media via multiple and relevant ARPHA-managed accounts. 

Please note that the PR team reserves the right to refuse distribution of a guest contribution on the occasion that it is provided in poor English, uses considerable amount of jargon or does not abide by basic ethical standards.


Custom Social Media Content

(Free service)

To help increase the visibility and outreach of their research, authors are welcome to suggest custom social media content to be distributed via suitable Pensoft- and ARPHA-managed social media accounts.

Social media posts are expected to:

  • Be limited to two short sentences or 280 characters (including links);
  • Be written in a conversational tone;
  • Contain minimal jargon;
  • Include the DOI link of the article;
  • Not duplicate the title or abstract of the article;
  • Include attractive non-copyright imagery;
  • Possibly include up to 10 social media accounts, e.g. co-authors (Twitter only), affiliations, funding bodies etc. relevant to the study.

Request our Custom social media content service by contacting our PR department (dissemination@pensoft.net).

Please note that our PR team reserves the right to edit your text at their discretion.


Media Center

Find One Ecosystem on Twitter and Facebook.

Learn about some of the most notable research published in One Ecosystem on Pensoft's blog.

See top news stories from around the globe, mentioning research published in One Ecosystem, in The National Interest, The Conversation, Science 2.0, Eco-Business.

Boost the reach of your paper(s) to a larger audience by making the most of Pensoft's science communication services.

Download journal promotional leaflet.

Download journal promotional logo.


Institutional and Other Membership Plans

Our plans provide additional flexibility and affordability for institutions, research groups, consortia, conference organizers and other larger research teams and organizations. Affiliated authors can publish in any Pensoft journal by using a streamlined payment interface. Pensoft’s plans are a great way to support open access publishing, while also simplifying budgeting, invoicing, and author reimbursement procedures. We offer three plans to choose from, however, if they do not quite suit your needs, we would be happy to discuss alternative arrangements with you. Please do not hesitate to contact us for a preliminary conversation about our plans!

 

Annual membership

Pre-paid plans

Direct billing

Key benefits

  • Flat rate - publish all you can
  • Cost based on the size and publishing pattern of your organization
  • Beginning of year budgeting
  • One invoice / no billing during the year
  • Discount on APCs
  • Deposit funds up-front and spend without a time limit
  • Add funds to your account at any time
  • Choose whether to cover full (discounted) cost of publishing or split costs with authors
  • No up-front payments
  • One monthly invoice for all publications by affiliated authors
  • Regular reports to track publication pattern and expenses

Additional services we can provide upon request

  • PR campaigns for specific publications or sets of publications, including press releases and video interviews
  • Institutional branding – including institutional logos on published papers, dedicated webpages, institutional online collections of articles
  • Research output reporting, detailing number and types of publications, expenses, views, and downloads

Please find more details about each individual plan below. If you would like to recommend Pensoft’s plans to your institution you can fill out this simple form or contact us at info@pensoft.net and we will forward your recommendation with some additional information.


Annual Memberships

Annual memberships allow institutions to plan their publishing expenses in the beginning of the fiscal year by providing unlimited publishing in all Pensoft journals in exchange for a flat annual payment. The cost of membership depends on the total publishing output capacity of the institution and its historical publishing pattern in Pensoft journals. We will adjust the cost of your membership annually.


Pre-Paid Plans

Pre-paid plans allow institutions and / or research groups to deposit a certain amount of funds with Pensoft and make them available to affiliated researchers for covering Article Processing Charges (APCs) in any Pensoft journal. Member institutions decide whether to cover APCs in full or share the expenses with the authors. Depending on the amount members are prepared to commit, Pensoft is offering a discount on APCs per the table below. Additional funds can be added to an account at any point in time within the calendar year of purchasing the plan, while leftover funds are preserved until spent.

 

Economy

Standard

Premium

Minimum deposit

€ 1,000 – 3,000

€ 3,000 – 5,000

€ 5,000 +

Discount on APCs

0%

5%

10%


Direct Billing

The direct billing plan allows institutions to reduce the complexity of billing and reimbursements. It consolidates all Pensoft invoices for articles authored by researchers affiliated with an institution into a single monthly bill that is sent directly to the institution.


Journal Info

 

Journal Name One Ecosystem
Journal URL https://oneecosystem.pensoft.net/
ISSN (online) 2367-8194
ISSN (print) -
Content Provider ARPHA
Publisher Pensoft Publishers
Journal Owner Pensoft Publishers
Owner URL https://pensoft.net
Start Year 2016
Review Type single-blind
Publication Frequency continuous
APC Accepted manuscripts are subject to APC (for more details see here)
License Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0)

 


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