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The International Mycological Association (IMA) has partnered with Pensoft to transition its flagship journal IMA Fungus to the ARPHA publishing platform after the open-access scientific publisher and technology provider won the bid by the IMA’s Executive Committee, following the expiration of their contract with BioMed Central (BMC, part of Springer-Nature). Already accepting manuscripts on its new website, the first publications in IMA Fungus since the transfer are expected in January 2025.
The move comes in a series of milestones for the prestigious journal in 2024, which also saw the appointment of its new Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, who has recently started his presidency at the IMA Council.
Committed to advancing mycological research and ensuring free access to high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific content, while representing the interest of mycology and mycologists worldwide, IMA’s Executive Board is confident that the new collaboration will further improve and streamline the publication process at IMA Fungus, and build up on its reputation in the field.
ARPHA platform’s intuitive and integrated end-to-end publishing workflow is designed to simplify the publication process for authors, reviewers, and editors. From submission to publication, automated full-text export to scientific databases and permanent hosting, all steps will be consolidated within a single, user-friendly interface, resulting in faster review cycles and more efficient communication between all parties involved. In addition to its signature publishing technology, Pensoft is providing IMA Fungus with various human-provided services, including help desk, design, science communication, marketing and journal development support.
Founded in 2010 at the 9th International Mycological Congress in Edinburgh, IMA Fungus was first published by the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (an institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, now Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute) until its move to BMC in 2018. Keeping up with tradition, the transfer of IMA Fungus to Pensoft and ARPHA was publicly announced at this year’s 12th  International Mycological Congress in Maastricht.
Today, IMA Fungus boasts an impressive Scopus CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor, standing at 11.0 and 5.2 respectively. It ranks 6th in the Mycology category on Web of Science.
Since day one, IMA Fungus has been mandated as the only journal in which formal proposals relating to the rules on the naming of fungi or protected lists of names are to be published under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants. Its scope covers all areas of mycology of interest to the wider mycological community, from basic to applied research.
“I am happy that we could get some of the most experienced editors to join us to the new publisher. Likewise, I am glad that many proficient young scientists from around the world, including most of the recent winners of the IMA Young Mycologist Award, joined our interdisciplinary editor panel.”
Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler, commenting on the latest news about IMA Fungus.
“It is a great honour to welcome IMA Fungus to the ARPHA family. We look forward to working with the International Mycological Association and helping to further advance their prestigious journal.”
Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, Pensoft’s founder and CEO.
To learn more about IMA Fungus or submit your manuscript, visit the journal’s newly launched website. Previous issues of the journal are available here.
To stay up-to-date with its new publication, sign up for its Email Alert newsletter from the journal’s homepage, and follow it on X and Facebook. Â
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About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent, open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider, best known for its 40+ biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, One Ecosystem and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Ever since becoming the first publisher to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a scientific article in the field of biodiversity in 2010, Pensoft has been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
About ARPHA:
ARPHA is a full-featured, open-access publishing platform for scholarly journals, books, data and conference outputs, developed by the scientific publisher and technology developer Pensoft. Clients are provided with a software solution as well as a range of relevant human-provided services. Standing for Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, ARPHA offers a wide range of tailorable services to publishers, societies, university presses, conference organisers and other academic institutions to provide them with a full-featured and all-rounded publishing experience, thereby saving them the extra efforts and unnecessary hassle of dealing with multiple vendors and service providers.
About the International Mycological Association:
The International Mycological Association, founded in 1971, represents the interests of over 30,000 mycologists worldwide. It is a non-for-profit organisation, the purpose of which is the encouragement of mycology in all its branches. This implies that the IMA should strive to promote mycology in its widest sense.
IMA Fungus is the flagship journal of the International Mycological Association. Papers on any aspect of mycology are considered, and published on-line with final pagination after proofs are corrected; taxonomic novelties are then effectively and validly published under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. The journal strongly supports good practice policies, and requires voucher specimens or cultures to be deposited in a public collection with an online database, DNA sequences in GenBank, alignments in TreeBASE, and validating information on new scientific names, including typifications, to be accessioned in MycoBank.
MycoBank is the online repository and nomenclatural registry provided in collaboration between the International Mycological Association and the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute. It provides a free service to the mycological and scientific society by databasing mycological nomenclatural novelties (new names and combinations) and associated data, such as descriptions, illustrations and DNA barcodes. Nomenclatural novelties are each allocated a unique MycoBank number to be cited in the publication where the nomenclatural novelty is introduced, to conform with the requirements of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants.