Editorial for journal issueNon peer reviewe

Aphalo, Pedro J.

Jansen, Marcel A. K.

Kotilainen, Titta

English

Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto

UV4Plants Bulletin, 2020, no. 1 From the editors’ deskWe think that the Bulletin is a valuable tool that helps keep our UV4Plants com-munity together. As we make progress in our aim of building a global role for theassociation, the Bulletin will help more members learn to know each other (meet-a-member, profiles). Current restrictions to international travel and lock-downsdue to the pandemic make this role of the Bulletin even more important. Our Bul-letin also informs about activities of our association such as conferences and work-shops, past and future. It provides tutorials about methods, guidelines for designof experiments and minimum requirements for reproducibility which are impor-tant for achieving UV4Plants’ contribution to encouraging good quality and use-ful UV-research. Book, software and equipment reviews can members’s decisions.Very importantly, the Bulletin also provides a forum where to express opinions andviewpoints. Publishing all this content under-open access and in a publication withlong-term archival practice not only helps members but advertises the existenceof our association. To better fulfil these roles, changes to this Bulletin have beenimplemented.We (Marcel Jansen, Titta Kotilainen and Pedro Aphalo) discussed several monthshow to improve the functioning of the Bulletin’s “editorial office” and made a pro-posal to the UV4Plants management committee, which was accepted. At the timewe were facing operational problems that prevented timely publication. The use ofour time was not efficient, section editors found it difficult to use the editorial userinterface of OJS and the spread of responsibilities across multiple section editorsmade tracking of the progress of submissions through the work flow very difficult.Pedro did no longer have enough free time to take care of the three roles of acqui-sitions editor, handling editor and production editor (typesetting and publication).Of the sections editors only Marcel, Titta, and Matt played very active roles in themost recently published issues of the Bulletin but they had been lacking clearlyassigned “official” roles.In the new scheme responsibility for editorial decisions about acceptance/revi-sion/rejection are shared by the three editors, who consult each other in unclearcases. In addition the following changes to the allocation of tasks to editors andto the handling of manuscripts were implemented earlier this year:1. Three editors do all editorial management. We no longer have section editors.2. The tasks of the editors are split according to the work flow instead of subjectsections: Marcel Jansen as acquisitions editor, Titta K. Kotilainen as handlingeditor and Pedro J. Aphalo as production editor and administrator for the OJSserver.3. Section editors became members of the new editorial review board.4. Instructions and messages in our on-line manuscript submission system wererevised for clarity.5. We aim at faster manuscript turn-around with the help of reviewers.Several changes to the Bulletin itself have been implemented starting from the11 From the editors’ deskpresent issue.a. Page layout changed from two-columns to one-column to make the Bulletineasier to read on screen.b. Fewer sections with a broader scope: Commentaries, Reports, Articles, Doc-toral thesis abstracts, Book, software and equipment reviews.c. Introduce the use of thematic categories (currently 12) as a classification or-thogonal to sections.d. Two regular columns: Meet-a-Member (hosted by Marcel A. K. Jansen) and Hintsand Tips (hosted/written by Pedro J. Aphalo).e. The Bulletin will be published twice per year, in June and December.We invite manuscript submissions for upcoming issues, both from members ofour association and non-members. We hope you will find that the changes de-scribed above are an improvement, but if not, or if you have suggestions abouthow to make the Bulletin more useful or attractive to both readers and authors,please, do send your feedback to us at mailto:bulletin@uv4plants.org.Wishing you enjoyable and instructive reading,Marcel A. K. Jansen, Titta K. Kotilainen, and Pedro J. Aphalo, Editors-in-Chief.Cork, Helsinki, and Joensuu, August 2020.DOI: 10.19232/uv4pb.2020.1.012

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