European Journal of Taxonomy - INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS
VISION
The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) is published and fully funded by a consortium of (European) natural history museums: neither authors, nor readers are required to pay fees or subscriptions. By coordinating institutional resources to create a single publishing platform, the journal encourages excellence, prevents redundancy, and increases efficiency in the dissemination of taxonomic data. It provides a secure, long-term platform at minimum cost.
EJT is thus a high-quality, fully free taxonomic journal that will offer all the modern interactive web-based facilities expected of a high-level, high-impact journal. EJT will set a high standard in taxonomic publishing.
SCOPE
The EJT is an international, fully electronic, Open Access journal for descriptive taxonomy, covering zoology, entomology, botany, and palaeontology. EJT-papers must be original and of a high scientific (content) and technical (language, artwork, etc.) standard. Manuscripts that fail to meet standards in either of these categories will not be sent out for review. Although EJT is sponsored by a consortium of (European) Natural History Institutes, its scope is global, both with regard to authorship and geographical region of study. Authors are, however, encouraged to involve European Natural History collections by consulting material or by depositing specimens (e.g. types and figured material) related to the published paper in the collection of a European Natural History Institute.
CATEGORIES OF PAPERS PUBLISHED BY EJT
EJT publishes the following categories of papers:
- Taxonomic contributions: contributions to the field of descriptive taxonomy, including (re-) descriptions of taxa, (sub-) continental or global checklists, taxonomic revisions, etc. Manuscripts describing a single or just a few species will need to demonstrate the general relevance of their publication.
- Monographs: papers falling into the categories listed above and exceeding 50 printed pages.
- Opinion papers: papers, in which authors offer information and interpretation of issues related to systematic biology and science policy making.
EJT will not publish correspondence, short notes, book reviews or any other kind of announcements.
TECHNICAL INSTRUCTIONS
Editorial policy
Authors are required to register type specimens in an official natural history collection prior to publication.
Submitted manuscripts will be checked for language, presentation, and style. Scientists who use English as a foreign language are urged to have their manuscript read by a native English-speaking colleague.
Papers which conform to journal scope and style will be sent to at least two referees by a member of the editorial board, who will then act as the coordinating editor.
Submission and review
Papers submitted for publication in EJT should be uploaded in the Editorial Manager system. Please follow instructions on the screen. Hard copy submissions or submissions to one of the editors as email attachments will not be considered. The entire review process will be conducted online through the Editorial Manager system, up to the final decision (accept or reject). Authors will be able to track online the status of their submission at any stage. If there are multiple authors for one article, then only the corresponding author one is able to track online the submission status.
Manuscripts should conform to standard rules of English grammar and style. Either British or American spelling may be used as long as usage is consistent throughout the manuscript. Although no page limit is imposed, manuscripts should always be as concise as possible.
Submitting a paper to EJT implies that the manuscript has not been submitted to another journal, and that it will not be for at least 6 months after initial submission to EJT.
Authors should adhere meticulously to these instructions.
Manuscripts returned to authors with referee reports should be revised and sent back through the Editorial Manager system within 4 weeks. If a major revision of a manuscript is requested, the revised manuscript will be sent out for re-review. Final decisions on acceptance or rejection will be made by the Editor-in-chief. Papers will be published online individually as soon as corrected proofs have been received and processed.
Copyright
EJT is a free open access journal licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Authors who publish with this journal accept to the following conditions:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are NOT PERMITTED to post their submitted work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on personal websites) prior to or during the submission process, as it may lead to nomenclatural problems arising.
Structure of manuscripts
Only the structure of ‘opinion’ manuscripts is flexible, all other contributions should follow the IMRAD format: Abstract, Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, General Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, captions of tables and figures.
Authors should submit following elements on the Editorial Manager system:
- one MS Word (.doc, .docx or .rtf) or Libre Office (.odt) file to include text, tables and captions of tables and figures.
- all the figures and tables individually in the formats specified below. Pdf is NOT an acceptable format for submission.
Editorial Manager will then build a single pdf file from the various manuscript elements for author approval.
Only the terms ‘tables’ and ‘figures’ should be used. Other categories (e.g. ‘plates’) are not acceptable. Monographs can include a table of contents and an index. If electronic supplementary material is provided other than text or figures, it should be uploaded during the submission process, using the button ‘Attach files’.
Format of manuscripts
General information
Text should be in Times New Roman font size 12, double-spaced, the margins’ width should be at least 3 cm on all sides. All pages of the text file should be numbered sequentially. Each line of the text should be numbered throughout the document.
No bold font should be used in the manuscript, except for described taxa (newly described or not) and for taxa names within an identification key.
Italic font is used in the main text for genera and infrageneric names, as well as for Latin expressions.
The format used for dates is the following one: day-month’s abbreviation-year, so the first September 2011 will be written ‘1 Sep. 2011’.
First page
The first page should contain the title (which should contain less than 110 characters, spaces included), the list of authors in the desired order, followed by the various addresses (indicated by superscript numbers), including emails, and the corresponding author with his/her mail address (See recently published examples).
A running title (max 50 characters) should be provided.
The title should always include the reference to the two higher hierarchical taxonomic categories of the taxon under discussion, e.g.:
‘On a new genus of ostracods (Crustacea, Ostracoda) from South Africa.’
The title page should also include the disclaimer ‘The present paper has not been submitted to another journal, nor will it be in the 6 months after initial submission to EJT. All co-authors are aware of the present submission.’
Authors are required to suggest at least 2, but preferably 3-5 reviewers (name, affiliation and email address) for their manuscript. This information must be inserted in the field ‘Suggest reviewers’, during the submission process.
Second page
The second page should contain the abstract and 5 keywords.
Abstracts are typically less than 200 words, except for monographs with many new taxa and alterations in the taxonomy. Abstracts should neither contain references, nor unexplained abbreviations.
Introduction
The Introduction should provide a succinct overview of past work in the field, illustrate why the present work is needed and in which domain it is situated. The progress offered by the present contribution should be summarised in one or two paragraphs at the end of the introduction.
Material and methods
In Material and Methods, only acronyms of collections and herbaria should be cited (not a detailed account of all museum material used, which should be given in the Results section). Additionally, authors might add the origin of the new material, technical equipment used, major technical literature applied, and software used for analyses or illustrations.
All abbreviations used within the article (parts of animals/plants, collections, localities, etc.) should be listed and explained here.
Results
The main part of the paper will be found under the Results, including taxonomic descriptions, ecology, phylogeny, biostratigraphy, etc. This section should start with a contextual account of the current taxonomic hierarchy of the target taxon. Each taxon account should, at least, include the following items in the order listed:
- accepted taxon name with author and year of description,
- reference to illustrations or tables in the present paper,
- list of synonymies, with full references to cited papers, including figures (see format below)
- for new species, diagnosis (in Latin or English for botanical papers) and differential diagnosis,
- etymology (for new taxa),
- type material examined (with collection registry and deposition),
- full (type) locality data (including decimal coordinates), if available,
- other material examined,
- full description of all relevant characters,
- taxonomic remarks, ecology and distribution.
If no holotype was originally designated from the available type material (syntypes), it is strongly recommended to designate a lectotype.
Redundancy of data should be avoided.
Discussion
The General Discussion will consider the findings of the paper in the context of the wider literature and indicates progress made within the field.
References
References in the main text should be written in lower case and without commas as follows: ‘(Smith 2000)’, ‘(Smith et al. 2000)’, ‘Smith (2000)’ and ‘Smith et al. (2000)’. Multiple references should be cited as (Smith 2000; Smith & Jones 2002; Jones et al. 2001). References published in the same year and containing the same first author’s surnames should be differentiated as follows: ‘Smith et al. (2000a)’, ‘Smith et al. (2000b)’. In the references list, the same convention (letters a, b, c, etc.) should be used.
The format adopted for the citation of references has been kept simple: italics should be used for journal names and book titles only (and of course for infraspecific and genus names); no bold font should be used in the references; journal names should be given in full and not abbreviated.
References are listed in alphabetical order and then chronologically (from the oldest to the newest year of publication). Within the same year of publication, for references sharing the same first author’s surname, references should be then listed alphabetically by surname of second author, surname of third author, etc.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) numbers of references should be provided whenever possible! You can easily find DOIs using the following tool: http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/
Examples of appropriate formats for references are:
Smith J.A. 2000. On a new genus of spiders from South America. Journal of natural History 205: 1034-1054.
- Article in a journal, with a doi (Digital Object Identifier) reference
Bremer B. & Manen J.F. 2000. Phylogeny and classification of the subfamily Rubioideae (Rubiaceae). Plant Systematics and Evolution 225: 43-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00985458
- Article in a thematic volume of a journal
Guyot M. 2000. Intricate aspects of sponge chemistry. In: Vacelet J. (ed.) Porifera 2000: Volume in honour to Professor Claude Lévi. Zoosystema 22 (2): 419-431.
Ruiter R.H. & Debelius H. 2006. World atlas of marine fishes. IKAN-Unterwasserarchiv, Frankfurt.
- Book belonging to a series
Griswold Ch.E. 1994. A revision and phylogenetic analysis of the spider genus Phanotea Simon (Araneae, Lycosoidea). Annales Sciences zoologiques 273, Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, Tervuren.
- Chapter or article in a book
Rougier G.W. & Wible J.R. 2006. Major changes in the ear region and basicranium of early mammals. In: Carrano M., Gaudin T.J., Blob R. & Wible J.R. (eds) Amniote Paleobiology: Phylogenetic and Functional Perspectives on the Evolution of Mammals, Birds and Reptiles: 269-311. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Book with several volumes or parts
Nairn A. et al. (eds) 1995. The Ocean Basins and Margins. Vol. 4: The Western mediterranean. Plenum Press, New-York
- Contribution in a Proceedings book, Conference report, etc.
Shandra P. & Mirad D. 1999. On the taxonomy of carabids (Coleoptera, Carabidae) from mountain forest in Zimbabwe. In: Merger T., Formsfield J. & Brooke D. (eds) Insect diversity in southern Africa. Proceedings of the first international symposium on African insect diversity: 117-128. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren.
DeRijk P. 1995. Optimisation of a database for ribosomal RNA structure and application in structural and evolutionary research. PhD thesis, University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Note that references to so-called ‘grey literature’, such as theses, should be avoided.
- User’s manual for a software
Swofford D.L. 2002. PAUP*: phylogenetic analysis using parsimony (*and other methods), v.4. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland.
Quinion M.B. 1998. Citing online sources: advice on online citation formats [online]. Available from http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/citation.htm [accessed 24 Jun. 2011]
Illustrations
Illustrations must be high quality, of high resolution and in portrait format.
During the submission process, authors will be asked to provide high quality figures with resolution of at least 300 dpi for photographs and of 1200 dpi for line drawings, in .jpeg or .tiff format. Maximum width of figures is 16 cm. As EJT is published online, illustrations in full colour are accepted free of charge. Scale bars are required for each figure. Lettering should be uniform and consistent, using Arial font, size 12. Figures must be numbered sequentially as they first appear in the text. Composite figures are always preferred and it is strongly recommended to use A, B, C, etc. to denote the different illustrations. Figures must be numbered sequentially as they first appear in the text.
Tables
Authors are free to present tables the way it suits their publication best, but tables also must be numbered sequentially as they first appear in the text and preferably in portrait format. The accepted formats are .doc, .docx, .odt and .rtf.
Nomenclature
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Zoology, Entomology, Fossil animals), the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants and the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants should be followed rigorously. Genera or infrageneric names should always be in italic font, names of higher taxonomic categories should not be in italic font. For uniformity, authors should use the following abbreviations: ‘sp. nov.’, ‘gen. nov.’, ‘fam. nov.’ at each occurrence of a new taxon, ‘comb. nov.’ for each new combination, ‘syn. nov.’ for each new synonym, etc. All new taxa names, new combinations and new synonymies must be recorded in the abstract. When citing a taxonomic name for the first time in the core text, author and year of publication should always be noted.
Described taxa presentation
For botany and palaeobotany, the synonymy list, if provided, should be presented as follows:
- Homotypic synonyms, listed in chronological order, with full references to cited papers, including figures; followed by the mention of the type material examined.
- Heterotypic synonyms, listed in chronological order, with full references to cited papers, including figures; each heterotypic synonym is followed by the mention of its type material.
- Illegitimate or invalid names, listed in chronological order, with an abbreviation of the name’s status with full references to cited papers. Here is an example:
Macrolobium palisotii Benth. (nom. illeg.; superfluous) Bentham 1865: 308.
Trianthema sedifolia Vis.
(Tab. 3, Fig. 1)
Plantae quaedam Aegypti ac Nubiae enumeratae atque illustratae: 19 (1836). — T. crystallina (Forssk.) Vahl var. sedifolia (Vis.) Hiern, Catalogue of the African plants collected by F.Welwitsch 1 (2): 415 (1898). — Type: Sudan, Khartoum, s.d., Brocchi s.n. (holo-: BASSA, n.v.).
Trianthema sedifolia Vis. var. microphylla Courbon, Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Botanique. Sér. 4, 18: 156 (1862). — Type: Eritrea, Dahlak Island, Dessie (Dissée), lieux argilleux de la plaine du village, s.d., Courbon s.n. (holo-: P, n.v.).
Trianthema glandulosa Peter, Feddes Repertorium Beihefte 40 (2): 30 (1932). — Type: Tanzania, Masai District, Emugur Belekj, alt. 870 m, 15 Jul. 1926, Peter 42741b (holo-: B).
Trianthema transvaalensis Schinz
Vierteljahresschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich 60: 396 (1915). — T. salsoloides var. transvaalensis (Schinz) Adamson, Journal of South African Botany 28: 248 (1962). — Type: South Africa, Transvaal, in arenos prope Matsaba, alt. 730 m, 4 Mar. 1897, Schlechter 4876 (holo-: Z; iso-: K).
Trianthema salsoloides Fenzl ex Oliver var. stenophylla Adamson (Journal of South African Botany 28: 249 (1962). — Type: South Africa, Transvaal, Kruger National Park, Gudjane Rd on turn, 20 Apr. 1954, van der Schijff & Marais 3734 (holo-: K; iso-: PRE).
- Zoology, entomology and palaeozoology
For zoology, palaeozoology and entomology, the synonymy list, if necessary, should be presented as follows:
- First: actual synonyms, listed in chronological order, with full references to cited papers, including figures;
-Second: non-original uses of taxonomic names, considered as synonyms of the described taxon, listed in chronological order with references to the cited papers, including figures. To avoid confusion with the previous list, these taxa names and their bibliographic references are separated by an ‘en-dash’, example as follows:
Myrtea venusta – Hedley 1913: 266, pl. 16, fig. 10.
-Third: incorrect referral to a taxon: these names are listed in chronological order and preceded by ‘non’, with full references to cited papers. These names are also separated from their bibliographical references by an ‘en-dash’.
Crossopalpus hirsutipes Collin, 1960
(Figs 79-83)
Crossopalpus hirsutipes Collin, 1960: 387.
Crossopalpus hirsutipes – Smith 1967: 2 (in key), figs 5, 6. — Pont 1995: 80 (type material). — Shamshev et al. 2006: 232, figs 1-7 (re-description).
Lepidolucina venusta (Philippi, 1847) comb. nov.
(Fig. 21A, B, E-H)
Lucina venusta Philippi, 1847: 206, pl. 1, fig. 2.
Lucina (Myrtea) layardii A. Adams, 1855: 225.
Lucina (Myrtea) strangei A. Adams, 1855: 226.
Lucina venusta – Reeve 1850: pl. 3, fig. 15.
Codakia strangei – Hedley 1909: 187.
Myrtea venusta – Hedley 1913: 266, pl. 16, fig. 10.
Phacoides (Lucinisca) venustus – Lamy 1920: 186.
Material examined
The presentation of the material examined can vary from one paper to another, depending on the subject, so authors are allowed to choose the presentation that will suit their publication best, as long as this choice is consistent throughout the whole publication, and as long as all the required elements (collection registry and deposition, full locality data when available) are present.
ACT
Authors are encouraged to apply Appropriate Citation of Taxonomy: the authors who want their citations of taxonomic names to be considered as references (and consequently to appear in the references list) should formally cite the taxonomic papers where they originate in their articles. See the required format in the "References" section.
For example, instead of writing "Chlamydotheca Saussure, 1858 was first described from South America", write: "Chlamydotheca was first described from South America (Saussure 1858)". In the latter case, the reference "(Saussure 1858)" is a real reference and citation (name and date not separated by a comma), in the former it is the authorship of the taxon (name and date separated by a comma).
Compliance with the Nomenclature Codes
Printed versions of EJT papers will be stored in the Natural History Institutions that are part of the EJT Consortium and distributed to some major natural history museums and institutions to comply with the rules regarding electronic publishing of new taxa of the different nomenclatural codes. Authors are encouraged to disseminate their work, they can directly download the pdf files of their articles from the platform, and distribute printed copies among their colleagues.
Open Submissions