Nature Conservation – a new open access journal

Nature conservation, a new open access journal, published its first issue these days. In their inaugural editorial , Editor-in-Chief Klaus Henle (who happens to be an institute colleague of mine) and his editorial team describe the scope of this journal as

[…] all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between scientists and practitioners. The journal will impose no restrictions on manuscript size or the use of colour. We will use an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and information dissemination. These include semantic mark-up of, and enhancements to published text, data, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources. We believe the journal will make an important contribution to better linking science and practice, offers rapid, peer-reviewed and flexible publication for authors and unrestricted access to content.

I have to admit that I hadn’t previously heard of Pensoft, the publisher behind Nature Conservation, but their conditions seem to be good, with very low publication costs (20 Euros/page), a decent website and Creative Commons (CC-BY) copyright. Clearly, copy editing will be limited at these prices, but the papers seem well readable, and, as I said in a previous post, I am somewhat doubtful as to how much added value is created by advanced copy editing anyway, at least for highly specialized subjects.

I’m looking forward to the next issues, and would like to wish the best of luck to the editorial team for establishing this new journal in the field.

References
Henle, K., Bell, S., Brotons, L., Clobert, J., Evans, D., Goerg, C., Grodzinska-Jurcak, M., Gruber, B., Haila, Y., Henry, P.-Y., Huth, A., Julliard, R., Keil, P., Kleyer, M., Kotze, D. J., Kunin, W., Lengyel, S., Lin, Y.-P., Loyau, A., Luck, G., Magnuson, W., Margules, C., Matsinos, Y., May, P., Sousa-Pinto, I., Possingham, H., Potts, S., Ring, I., Pryke, J., Samways, M., Saunders, D., Schmeller, D., Simila, J., Sommer, S., Steffan-Dewenter, I., Stoev, P., Sykes, M., Tóthmérész, B., Yam, R., Tzanopoulos, J. & Penev, L. (2012) Nature Conservation – a new dimension in Open Access publishing bridging science and application. Nature Conservation, 1, 1-10.

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