Abstract
Two of the IAVS journals, the Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science, in recent years suffered from a pattern that is not easy to explain: a decline in manuscript submissions.And it seems that these journals are not alone; several other traditional (or reputable, if you want) ecological journals are suffering a decline in the number of manuscripts submitted for review.At the same time, we are living in an era when the number of published papers is doubling every 14 years, not only because there is more scientific money for doing research and more scientists, but also because if you don't publish, you perish.So why fewer submissions?There of course can be a wide range of explanations, starting from those directly related to the journals themselves.The Impact Factor (IF) may be perceived as not high enough, so some colleagues may prefer to submit their manuscripts elsewhere.Editorial handling time may seem too long, so some colleagues may search for faster venues.And those wanting (or having to) publish open access may find the article processing charges (APC) by both journals too expensive, and search for cheaper outlets.All these are valid points but when given context, the trend is not worrying; the impact factors of JVS and AVS seem to simply fluctuate or even increase, but have not declined.And both editorial handling time and APC are comparable to other reputable journals.The alternative explanation is rather obvious: there are more and more journals where scholars can publish, and with the era of online publishing, some of these journals are not restricted by the number of papers they are able and willing to publish.Most of the new journals offer fast editorial times, since their reviews focus only on the evaluation of the technical quality of the manuscript, and not whether they bring novelty and move science forward.Practically all new journals are published as Gold Open Access, available online for free to readers, because authors pay the publication fees.And some of these journals, after they are included in citation databases (especially Web of Science, which calculates the traditional Impact Factor), within a couple of years reach the IF values that are well comparable to the traditional journals and quite attractive for authors.
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Claims 0
Judged off_topic: no plant question — claims were not extracted. This is a scope decision by the model, not a statement about the paper’s findings.