Titled “Enlighten the Marvels: A New Journal Dedicated to Natural History Museums, Collections, and Their Role in Interpreting a Changing World,” the article outlines the journal’s mission to address gaps in research and practice in the field of natural history collections.
Natural History Collections and Museomics promoted by Pensoft at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology in Kyoto, Japan.
Editors-in-Chief Dr. Franco Andreone, Prof. Shuqiang Li, Dr. Shelley James and Deborah Paul penned the editorial alongside Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev and COO Prof. Pavel Stoev. Their contribution builds on the recent official announcement of the journal’s launch on the ARPHA Platform.
The new journal, the editorial team writes,aims to tap the potential of natural history collections to confront global challenges such as climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, and zoonotic diseases.
“[Natural history museums] need visible allies, and we call for other disciplines, university departments, industry and governments to stand up and actively support the care and development of collections and the collective expertise and data connected across them,” reads the editorial.
“Modern technologies and the rapid development of science make it possible to apply new transformative methods and approaches to the study of collection materials, which may reveal important information from an innovative and evolutionary point of view.”
Supported by CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), Europe’s leading voice for taxonomy and systematic biology, NHCM encourages interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across fields such as taxonomy, conservation, education, ethics, and museum studies.
Submissions to the journal are open, and the first articles will be published in 2025. Researchers, scholars, and practitioners are invited to contribute.
For more information and submission guidelines, please visit the Natural History Collections and Museomicswebsite.You can also follow the journal on X, Facebook and Bluesky.
The journal aims to serve as a leading platform for scholarly research, discussion, and innovation in the field of natural history collections worldwide and will be published by Pensoft Publishers.
By promoting the exchange of knowledge between museum professionals, researchers, educators, and enthusiasts, the publication aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of natural history and its significance in society.
Natural History Collections and Museomics promoted by Pensoft at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology in Kyoto, Japan.
Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM) encourages interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across fields such as taxonomy, conservation, education, ethics, and museum studies. The editorial team welcomes original research articles, reviews, case studies, methods, letters and perspectives addressing a wide range of topics related to natural history institutions and collections.
The journal is supported by CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), Europe’s leading voice for taxonomy and systematic biology. The support of this European network of scientific institutions ensures a robust and collaborative foundation for the journal’s academic endeavours.
By utilising a Diamond Open Access model, the journal allows free access to published content without any fees for authors or readers. This approach ensures that important research can reach the widest possible audience, promoting inclusivity and global collaboration in the field.
A strong Editorial Board is already in place, co-chaired by two distinguished scholars in the field.
Dr Franco Andreone: Serving as the zoology curator at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin, Italy, Dr Andreone is a renowned herpetologist with a profound impact on amphibian taxonomy, roles of natural history museums and conservation, particularly in Italy and Madagascar. His experience as a former Chair of the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group – Madagascar and his current role as a special advisor underscore his life-longdedication to preserving biodiversity.
Prof Shuqiang Li: A prominent Chinese arachnologist, Prof Li brings his vast expertise in zoological systematics to the journal. Among many accomplishments, he led the construction of 29 natural history museums for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of which is an 8,800 square metre collection building to preserve more than 10 million specimens and another a 6,600 square metre public museum in the Zoological Institute in Beijing. As leading taxonomist and the Editor-in-Chief of Zoological Systematics, Professor Li has described more than 2,000 new species. His work on how Tethyan changes shaped diversification is most notable. His research has also revealed the origin of spider webs based multi-omics analyses.
The Board expects the team of subject (associate) editors to soon expand further, as they have been actively recruiting colleagues from diverse professional and geographical backgrounds. Experts in fields within the scope of the new journal are also invited to apply to join the NHCM team as either editors or reviewers. Conveniently, the respective application forms are made accessible from the journal website’s homepage.
“The journal Natural History Collections and Museomics will serve as a perfectforum and place to publish cutting-edge research.
“Natural history collections are gargantuan resources and tools to discover and preserve global diversity. We need to treat them as immense treasures to discover and describe new species and understand Earth’s marvels.”
Dr Franco Andreone and Prof Shuqiang Li, Editors-in-Chief.
“We are thrilled to launch Natural History Collections and Museomics on the ARPHA Platform. The importance of natural history collections cannot be overstated and we look forward to publishing valuable research to a wide audience.”
Prof Dr Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers.
Submissions to the journal are now open. Researchers, scholars, and practitioners are invited to contribute articles to Natural History Collections and Museomics.
For more information and submission guidelines, please visit the Natural History Collections and Museomicswebsite.
You can also follow the journal on X and Facebook.
About ARPHA Platform:
ARPHA is a full-featured, end-to-end publishing platform for journals, books, conference materials and preprints. ARPHA offers flexible operating and business models, and a wide-range of automated and human-provided services. The ARPHA team places a special focus on its scholarly communication solutions designed to leverage the visibility and outreach of academic output, while promoting inclusivity and engagement.
About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, includingZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomicsand many others. Over the past 30 years, Pensoft has built a reputation for its innovations in the field, after launching ZooKeys: the very first digital-first scientific journal in zoology and the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a biodiversity article. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
The new innovative academic journal makes use of the one-of-a-kind publishing platform ARPHA and its collaborative writing tool via the ARPHA-XML workflow
A new innovative open-access academic journal Metabarcoding and Metagenomics(MBMG) is launched to welcome novel papers from both basic and applied aspects.
Focusing on genetic approaches to study biodiversity across all ecosystems, MBMG covers a considerably large scope of research including environmental, microbial and applied metabarcoding and metagenomics (especially DNA-based bioassessment and -monitoring, quarantine, nature conservation, species invasions, eDNA surveillance), as well as associated topics, such as molecular ecology, DNA-based species delimitation and identification, and other emerging related fields. Submissions of bioinformatic approaches to MBMG (algorithms, software) are also encouraged.
Featuring novel article formats and data publishing workflows, MBMG is to reflect the rapid growth in the use of metabarcoding and metagenomics in life and environmental sciences.
Issued via ARPHA – the first ever publishing platform to support manuscripts all the way from authoring to peer review to publication and dissemination, designed by the academic publisher and technology provider Pensoft, the new journal is to host a wide range of outcomes from across the research cycle, including data, models, methods, workflows, software, perspectives, opinions, implementation strategies, as well as conventional research articles.
While the above-mentioned publication types are already available in other journals published on the ARPHA platform, such as Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), Biodiversity Data Journal and One Ecosystem, MBMG provides five extra domain-specific article types, namely: Emerging Technique, Applied Study, DNA Barcode Release, Primer Validation and Probe Validation.
The journal’s articles are to be available in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML) and full of semantic enhancements for better human- and machine-readability and discoverability. The XML-based workflow also ensures that content and data are available for extraction, indexing and re-use immediately after publication.
With Pensoft standing for transparent, reproducible and open science, the authors at MBMG are strongly encouraged to make all data publicly available either within the publication itself, or to link to external repositories. In their turn, the peer reviewers are also suggested to provide public access to their reviews and identities.
In time for the launch, MBMG has already gathered a team of experienced and renowned scientists from across the globe together on its editorial and advisory board.
“I am pleased to introduce the Metabarcoding and Metagenomics journal to the family of Pensoft,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and Managing Director at Pensoft. “With its exhaustive scope and advanced services and concept, I believe it fills fantastically a niche in our strong portfolio of mostly biodiversity- and ecology-themed journals.”
“Metabarcoding and metagenomics approaches are rapidly progressing and revolutionise research and its application alike,” Chief Editor Prof. Florian Leese states. “With the MBMG journal we provide an ideal platform to respond to this rapidly growing field, nucleate the emerging knowledge and stimulate further development.”
The first batch of research papers published in MBMG are now available on their new website.
“MBMG not only complements the range of journals in the field of molecular environmental life sciences, but also stands out as a novel outlet providing several unique features designed to help researchers to prepare for, and professionally deal with, the massive “deluge” of data,” reads the Editorial.
To celebrate the launch, MBMG starts with a tempting offer to potential authors: publishing will be completely free of charge during the beginning stages of the journal.
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