News from the Editors:
Looking back to the year 2019 and reviewer appreciation
We look back on an exciting and ambitious year: we successfully migrated our journal www.landscape-online.org (issn: 1865-1542) to our new journal platform based on Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), hosted by Center for Digital Systems – CeDiS at Freie Universität Berlin. This platform from now on facilitates the entire editorial management workflow and allows to better deal with the increased number of manuscripts submitted during the last years. OJS also supports the indexing processes with a number of databases for scientific literature (e.g. Crossref, DOAJ, Scopus….), long-term archiving of all articles in the German National Library and further services, as well as automated plagiarism check using iThenticate that is based on Crossref Similarity Check. This will help to enhance quality and visibility of our journal.
The official relaunch of Landscape Online took place at the IALE World Congress 2019 in Milan and signified quite a step forward in our transformation into an international journal with broad support of the IALE community. IALE-Europe has become our new journal partner besides ialeUK. We would like to thank both chapters supporting us in this process during the last year. We are looking forward to welcome further IALE chapters as journal partners soon.
We are proud to have achieved this transformation without now being affiliated to a profit-oriented publisher. By staying independent and published by IALE Germany, our open access academic online journal contributes to the diversity of publication mediums for landscape ecologists.
Furthermore, we have restructured our editorial board and significantly increased its members. Besides the publishers board members from IALE Germany we have now additional 18 experts from around the world. Our editorial board now represent the international IALE community and further experts in Landscape Ecology - from well established scientists to early career scholars. We acknowledge the support and future dedication of our new editorial board members:
Andreas Aagaard Christensen (Denmark), Audrey L. Mayer and Jessica Price (USA), Cristian Echeverria (Chile), Christoph Merz, Claus Dalchow, Dagmar Haase, Olaf Schroth, Stefan Heiland (Germany), Dolors Armenteras (Colombia), Emilio Padoa-Schioppa and Irene Petrosillo (Italy), Hannes Palang (Estonia), Jochen A. G. Jaeger (Canada), Leila Mahmoudi Farahani (Australia), Simona R. Grădinaru (Romania), Uta Schirpke (Austria), and Veerle Van Eetvelde (Belgium)
We are looking forward to further candidates to complement our editorial board – get in contact in case you are interested.
Besides our journal re-organisation, in 2019 we published 14 articles and handled about 42 manuscripts in total (at various stages of the publishing process, many of them still under review). Both numbers are again higher than the previous year with highest numbers so far. This also underpins the need to further develop our capacities and structures as outlined. However, all this would not have been possible without the support of our reviewers. We would like to thank all persons listed on the right supporting us in 2019 for dedicating us their valuable time and expertise to conduct review.
We wish you a powerful and good start into the new year 2020! We hope to meet again at the upcoming congresses of the different IALE chapters, such as in Toronto organized by the new IALE regional chapter North America or at the 20 years anniversary congress of IALE Germany. Please keep also in mind, in July 2021 the next IALE European Landscape Ecology Congress, taking place in Poland.
The Editorial Management of Landscape Online and Executive Committee of IALE Germany
Visit us at: www.landscape-online.org
Reviewer Appreciation 2019 (in alphabetic order):
Alexandra Dulic, Alessandro Gretter, Andreas Calvo, Angela Lausch, Astrid Moser, Audrey Mayer, Biancamaria Torquati, Carsten Paul, Christa Hainz-Renetzeder, Christian Albert, Daniele Torreggiani, Didit Okta Pribadi, Erich Tasser, Fahed Al-Mana, Gabor L Lovei, Hannes Palang, Hubert Wiggering, Irene Petrosillo, Jan Thiele, Janina Kleemann, Jesse Caputo, Jesse Rieb, John Thomlinson, Katharina Diehl, Kevin Thellmann, Leila Mahmoudi Farahani, Liam Crowther, Marion Jay, Mihai Sorin Stupariu, Olaf Schroth, Roberta Bottarin, Rodolfo Jaffé, Roman Lenz, Rosalia Filippini, Rudi van Etteger, Tibor Hartel, Thomas Kirchhoff
Photo from official relaunch of new journal platform during IALE-Europe Meeting
with the European Chapters in Milan (Photo: Davide Rizzo)