The pros and cons of being broad: recent and future progress of Nordic Journal of Botany

Abstract

From the very beginning, Nordic Journal of Botany has aimed at being a broad and truly international journal. Our scientific scope is broad, essentially covering all aspects of plant and fungal biodiversity research, including ecology, biogeography, conservation, evolution and taxonomy/systematics, and all related disciplines that provide results that will improve our understanding of ecology, conservation, biogeography, evolution and taxonomy (e.g. ecophysiology, anatomy and cytology). However, there always need to be some limits, and therefore we do not accept manuscripts that are focused on economic botany, cultivated plants, forestry or plant breeding, and studies focused on physiology, anatomy or cytology need to be presented in an ecological, evolutionary or systematic context to be considered for publication. The reasons why we want to keep our scope as broad as possible are that we want as many authors as possible in the field of botany, mycology and ecology to feel welcome to submit their manuscripts to us, without having to think about the possible restrictions set by our scope, and that as many readers as possible should find at least something interesting and relevant in our published content. To make this even more clear for authors and readers, we have this year explicitly introduced a number of different manuscript categories, and we have implemented routines for treating these separately when justified. Thus, apart from regular research papers, authors can now choose to submit manuscripts also in the categories ‘Short standard papers’ (which may be e.g. pilot studies with promising but inconclusive results), ‘Check lists’, ‘Methods’, ‘Reviews’ and ‘Initiatives’ (e.g. descriptions of new multinational research projects or calls for help/collaboration in such projects). Even though taxonomic botany tends to dominate our content, we are proud that we have so far been successful in covering most branches of our discipline, and we want to continue on that route. Thus, in our most recent volumes you can read about e.g. seed micromorphology (Koksheeva et al. 2015, Patil et al. 2015, Salimi Moghadam et al. 2015), wood and stem anatomy (Jangid and Gupta 2015, Novikoff and Mitka 2015), karyology (Hong et al. 2016) and flower ontogeny (Naghiloo et al. 2015), as well as the relative conservation benefits of different management practices (Tälle et al. 2015), interactions between the flora and wild boar (Brunet et al. 2016), ecophysiology of African Cyperus (Ayeni et al. 2015) and allelopathy in Empetrum (González et al. 2015), in addition to many contributions to plant systematics and taxonomy. As for these latter, we have published descriptions of new plant species from almost all parts of the world, e.g. China (among many others Liu et al. 2016, Wang et al. 2016, Zhou et al. 2016), India (among many others Chorghe et al. 2015, Gogoi and Borah 2015), Thailand (Kidyoo 2015) and Vietnam (Averyanov et al. 2016) in Asia, Ukraine and Spain in Europe (Chkalov 2015, Blanca et al. 2016), Tanzania, South Africa and Madagascar in Africa (Cupido 2015, Stone 2015, Byng 2016), Brazil (Wilmot-Dear et al. 2015, Freitas et al. 2016) and Guatemala (Archila et al. 2015) in South America, and Mexico in North America (González-Gallegos and Castro-Castro 2016, Vázquez-García et al. 2016). Likewise, our taxonomic contributions cover all major vascular plant groups from orchids (Hall et al. 2015, Sanguinetti 2015, Szlachetko and Kolanowska 2015, Kumar et al. 2016) and bamboos (Nguyen and Tran 2016) to Asteraceae (Øllgaard 2015, Attar et al. 2016, Negaresh and Rahiminejad 2016, Nilsson and Tyler 2016). Mycology and lichenology also has a natural position in our content, with important recent contributions such as those by Ekman (2015), Jüriado et al. (2015, 2016), Hestmark (2016), Liu and He (2016) and Spirin et al. (2016). Algaeology has been represented by contributions about chrysophytes (Němcová 2014, Wei et al. 2014), and bryology by a description of a new species of Didymodon (Kou et al. 2016). However, being broad also have some disadvantages that we are well aware of and which we try to counteract. There is a risk that contributions dealing with subjects that are less often included in our contents go unnoticed by researchers in the relevant fields if they are not used to search in our journal. To reduce this risk, our editors are very active in social media and try to advertise our content wherever possible, and this is something that should be advantageous for all our authors and readers, and which is likely to become even more important in the future. Thus, all contributions published by us are presented and highlighted on both Facebook and Twitter by the editors, and all contributions believed to be of special relevance for readers in China are presented in Mandarin on Weibo by our special Weibo editor. We will also soon begin to highlight particular contributions as ‘Editor's choice’. This ensures that all papers published by us are immediately seen by at least a few hundreds, and sometimes several thousands, botanists around the globe. Just as an example, the study by Andersen et al. (2016) on hybrid dogroses in Norway was in just a few weeks after publication viewed by more than 2500 followers on Facebook alone. Another problem of being broad is related to the use of bibliometric indices. It is well known that publication traditions and citation activity varies among scientific fields and this has of course consequences for the calculation of Journal Impact Factors (IF) for journals with different scopes. Thus, while the current IF of Nordic Journal of Botany is above average for journals with a plant taxonomic/systematic scope, as well as for journals focused on cryptogamic botany or mycology, an IF of about 1 may not be seen as competitive if compared to journals in fields like ecology, molecular phylogenetics or global change. Still, we have recently published important contributions in these latter fields, e.g. Li et al. (2015) and Yousefi et al. (2016) on molecular phylogeny, Moradi et al. (2016) on spatial plant ecology, Torres-García et al. (2015) on the evolutionary consequences of herbicide resistant plants, Paiva Farias et al. (2015) on tropical phenology and Tang et al. (2015) on molecular evolution in hybrids. We also know that many authors have found that the advantages of publishing with Nordic Journal of Botany, including a relatively fast review processes, rigorous editorial processing and editing of accepted manuscripts, advertising on social media, and Nordic Journal of Botany being society-owned and run on a non-profit basis, well compensate for the relatively low IF. Since the uncritical use of IF for ranking and evaluating scientists and institutions, in particular when it comes to comparisons between different scientific disciplines, has been much debated in recent years we also try to actively promote and present alternative measures of scientific quality and impact, such as the Altmetric score which is presented for all articles on our online platform. We also like to see our recent association with Publons as an initiative in this same direction, as Publons provide reviewers with a tool for tracking and getting credit for their work. Otherwise, the most important service provided by external peer reviewers, although extremely highly appreciated by the editors of all scientific journals, tend to go unnoticed since we for obvious reasons may not reveal the names of our anonymous reviewers. A somewhat related problem concerns the completeness of submitted manuscripts. Many authors and institutions nowadays appear to view the number of publications as more important than their quality and long-term usability for other scientists. ‘Salami publishing’, i.e. the habit of splitting the results of major research projects into numerous short manuscripts, is negative in many different ways for both journals and readers. For journals, their editors and reviewers, more work and resources than actually needed has to be put on handling an exaggerated quantity of submitted manuscripts. In particular, we should all strive to utilize the unpaid work done by external reviewers as well as possible. For readers and future generations of scientists, the result will be that to get the complete picture they will have to find, obtain and consult even more separate publications than today. Being a taxonomist myself, I very well know how much effort it may take to find and obtain e.g. all publications containing original descriptions of new species in a particular genus, and I will therefor try to contribute as much as I can to spare future generations of scientists that work. In addition, reading multiple closely similar publications in search for some new details may also be considered a waste of time and effort, and at the same time as it may appear necessary to repeat introductory background information in publications on closely related subjects, republishing closely similar sections in different publications is actually prohibited by international copyright regulations. Therefore, I strongly urge all authors to as far as possible combine their results into more complete and thorough contributions that will have a far greater value for both journals and future scientists. Although Nordic Journal of Botany will continue to publish short papers containing e.g. descriptions of single new species, we want to encourage authors to submit more complete revisions of e.g. a group of related taxa, and we will not accept contributions that obviously could have been better published in a broader context. As excellent examples of thorough contributions that beyond doubt will keep their value as baselines for future research for many decades I want to highlight e.g. Piirainen (2015) on Salicornia in northwest Europe, El Mokni et al. (2015) on Delphinium elatum s.l. in North Africa, and Fayed et al. (2015) on Teucrium in Egypt. We are also proud of being a truly international journal. Actually, both our submissions and our published content today fairly well reflect the distribution of the human population on earth, with large countries like China, India and Brazil contributing most to our published content. Still, over the last few years we have published papers with first authors from over 50 countries on all continents, including contributions from relatively small countries like Latvia (Auniņa and Auniņš 2015), Uzbekistan (Tojibaev and Beshko 2015) and Panama (Valdespino 2016). We want to see these figures as a final proof that we have no geographic or political biases and that publishing in Nordic Journal of Botany is an efficient way to reach a global audience. During the last years we have also actively worked on increasing our editorial team, both in terms of scientific competence and geographic coverage, and we now have Subject Editors on four continents. Being this international also implies that we have the responsibility to make sure that our published content is of international interest. Therefore, when we find that research is only relevant in a national or regional context we regularly have to reject submitted manuscripts and refer their authors to more regionally focused journals. However, since such decisions can usually be taken directly by the Editor-in-Chief, they are generally communicated within 1–3 working days such that authors do not need to lose any significant amount of time by letting us evaluate their manuscripts before seeking other outlets. Another implication of being truly international is that we have to accept that communication with authors not always runs smoothly, and even so in cases when it may slow down the publication process. Still today, not all scientists on earth have guaranteed access to fast electronic communication. Linguistic and cultural differences may also pose problems, although these can usually be avoided if acknowledged and respected by all parts involved. Manuscripts to be handled by Nordic Journal of Botany have to be written in English and fully understandable in all details, but all accepted manuscripts are edited linguistically by our editors to ensure readability and clarity. However, we cannot expect all authors worldwide to write as native English speakers and, even though responsibility for every word in the manuscripts will always stay with the author, offering some basic linguistic help is seen by us as a means to ensure that our decisions concerning what should be published is based solely on scientific merit and not subjected to any geographic or cultural biases. Likewise, our special editor for botanical nomenclature and Botanical Latin edit all manuscripts to ensure that all nomenclatural actions published by us conform to the International Code of Nomenclature. It is unavoidable that this editorial editing process takes some time and our authors therefore sometimes have to wait a little longer for the final publication of their accepted manuscripts, but we are convinced that it is worth to wait for. To conclude, although we are aware of the disadvantages of being broad, Nordic Journal of Botany wants to stay broad and become even broader. We feel confident that our authors and readers will acknowledge our continuous efforts to counteract and overcome the disadvantages, and agree that the value of publishing in a society-owned journal with rigorous editing services and dedicated to spreading botanical science worldwide, across all political, cultural and linguistic borders, as well as in all modern media, is unsurpassable.