Editorial: 2008 year in review.

Abstract

2008 was an eventful inaugural year for Evolutionary Applications. We published four issues comprising 45 papers in total, including the special issue: Evolutionary Perspectives on Salmonid Conservation and Management. Wiley-Blackwell sponsored an Evolutionary Applications symposium at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution annual meeting in Vancouver (May), and hosted an official Evolutionary Applications launch reception at the SSE annual meeting in Minneapolis (June). The journal received much press coverage, and was featured in both Nature and New Scientist. The year was successfully capped with the acceptance of the journal for full indexing in ISI. The Editorial team would like to thank the scientific community for their overwhelming support of this new and unique journal. Undoubtedly this support, as well as the official endorsement of the journal by both the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), contributed to the exceptionally rapid acceptance of the journal into ISI. In 2008, Evolutionary Applications published papers in most of the fields listed on our website (http://www.evolutionaryapplications.org; see Table 1). Published papers also focused on a wide diversity of organisms of applied importance, including plants, animals and microbes (Table 2). Clearly, the journal is fulfilling its primary goal of being the principal outlet for the increasing number of high-quality papers using evolutionary concepts to address issues of economic, medical and social relevance. Table 1 Subjects covered in 2008 in Evolutionary Applications Table 2 Examples of organisms of applied significance featured in Evolutionary Applications In 2009, we are again publishing four issues, including this current special issue on evolutionary medicine, and an upcoming special issue on the impact of harvesting on fish evolution and Darwinian fishery science. Among other events, in August, Wiley-Blackwell will be sponsoring a full-day symposium on evolutionary applications at the 12th ESEB Congress in Turin, Italy. Despite being in our first year of operation, we succeeded in maintaining a very short time from submission to first decision (34 days). Also, our transparent online review and production system allows authors to track the progress of their manuscripts from submission to publication. We will continue striving both to publish the highest quality research on applied evolution, and to make the importance and broad relevance of evolutionary biology more accessible to all interested readers.