As you may know a number of changes are taking place with the IAWA Journal. Over the past few months the new editors in chief, Lloyd Donaldson (New Zealand) and Marcelo Pace (Mexico) have taken an increasing role in handling manuscripts under the careful supervision of Pieter Baas. Most manuscripts are now being copy-edited directly by Marc Jarmuszewski and the team at Brill Publishing as Emmy van Nieuwkoop retires later in the year and is now only dealing with the remaining issues of Vol. 40. From Vol. 41 (2020) the journal will change to a slightly larger format with the standard Brill font although the layout of manuscripts will remain the same. Both Pieter Baas and Elisabeth Wheeler will retire as Editors in Chief at the end of this year but will continue as associate editors. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Pieter, Elisabeth and Emmy for their many years of service for the journal.
The new Editors in Chief may be unfamiliar to some of you, so we are taking this opportunity to introduce ourselves and to outline our vision for the editorial team.
Lloyd Donaldson is a senior scientist at Scion in Rotorua in New Zealand and has been a member of IAWA since 1980. Lloyd has been an associate editor for IAWA Journal since 2004 and also served on the IAWA Council from 2007-2014. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science and is currently secretary of the IAWS. Lloyd works on wood ultrastructure and has published extensively on lignin, microfibril angle and many other topics with 115 scientific publications including 14 book chapters. He is currently working on nanoscale cell wall properties such as porosity using advanced fluorescence techniques, in relation to wood chemical modification.
Marcelo Pace, originally from Brazil, is a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He completed his PhD at the University of São Paulo and worked for two years as a postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution. His interactions with the IAWA started when he attended the International Botanical Congress in Vienna 2005 as an undergraduate student. Since then he has been actively interacting with members of the Association and promoting the IAWA in congresses and meetings around the world. Marcelo has also acted as one of the editors of the IAWA Bark List of Microscopic Features. His main interest is in the evolution of complex stem anatomies, especially in lianescent lineages, where numerous unusual types of secondary growths have evolved.
We would like to establish closer links to the Associate Editorial team and to create a workflow routine between the Editors-in-Chief and the Associate Editors (AE). This would include the assignation of approximately one manuscript per month or less to each AE, who would then be responsible to select 2+ reviewers and make sure we have our manuscripts well evaluated within a reasonable timeframe. Given this suggested routine, we would like to hear from you if you would like to continue in the team of AE or if the moment is not ideal for you. We will rely on your help to keep our journal in the top list of wood science journals.
Uwe Schmitt will retire at the end of this year and we would like to thank him for his service as associate editor and referee. We would like to increase the size of the associate team to ensure we cover all of the scientific topics considered by the journal.
We also hope to meet more of you at future meetings, and to be able to bring our students to our meetings and get them involved in our Association.
The IAWA Journal is a scientific periodical, with papers covering all aspects, fundamental and applied, of wood and bark structure, such as:
- structure-property relations
- wood identification
- methodology
- ultrastructure
- wood and bark anatomy per se
- fossil woods and archaeology
- systematic and phylogenetic wood anatomy
- development and morphogenesis
- functional and ecological anatomy
- structure and properties of bamboo and rattan
- microscopical and microtechnical methods.
Book reviews, Wood anatomy news (including announcements of and reports from meetings and requests for samples), and abstracts for meetings are also included.
We would like to ask each AE to select from the above list the pertinent fields within which they would like to receive submissions from. This information will also be posted in our website, where the authors who are submitting a manuscript can already suggest an AE who he/she believe is the best fit to manage their paper, similarly to what is done in all major journals. We will update the editorial board web page soon, so if you want to submit a new photo or other updated details send them to us and we will coordinate the update.
https://www.iawa-website.org/en/IAWA_Journal/Editor_Board.shtml
IAWA Journal is currently the top wood science journal in terms of both h-index and ranking. Our provisional 2019 h-index is 3.182. This gives us a tough target to maintain but we plan to continue the strategy of special issues and reviews on key topics. In addition to the special issues for 2019 there will be a special issue on methods for wood identification to be published at the end of 2020 and we already have one manuscript accepted for this special issue. This will be edited by Yafang, Alex and Lloyd.
A reminder about the Bailey award, nominations close in a couple of months and a reminder will be sent in the IAWA newsletter.
Because Brill are now doing the copy editing the procedure for approval has changed slightly. If you are working on a manuscript and get to the approval stage, please send us both an email and one of us will take over the final editing and approval steps.
Lloyd A. Donaldson
Marcelo R. Pace
August 2019
