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Journal of the History of Biology
Publishing model:
Hybrid

Journal of the History of Biology - JHB Topical Collections Announcement

We are pleased to announce a new initiative for JHB that encourages the submission of articles that specifically address certain “themes.”  Hoping to stimulate new scholarship in areas that we wish to encourage greater attention, we have established a series of “Topical Collections” to which we actively encourage submissions.  These Topical Collections include:

Each of these Topical Collections will be overseen by one or more Collection Editors, who independently shepherd individual articles through the editorial review process.  Final decisions about the acceptance of an article will, however, continue to rest with the Editors in Chief.  The Collection Editors have developed individual Calls for Papers that lay out the intellectual terrain they envision for their collection.  These Topical Collections are now ready to welcome submissions.

Topical Collections bear some similarity to Special Issues that JHB has traditionally published.  For example, articles in a collection will collectively address issues related to certain thematic topics.  However, Topical Collections also reflect some important differences and advantages.  

Articles addressing these themes will be tagged (via key words) in online publication. We see this “theme-tag” strategy primarily as a means of inviting sustained consideration of particular historiographical areas of biology studies. This scholarly conversation, we think, will enable JHB to stimulate interdisciplinary knowledge production.  It will also acknowledge how current readers and researchers tend to access their content – not by browsing issues, but via search engines that connect them to individual articles. The introduction of “theme-tags” will also eventually take advantage of the Continuous Article Publication (CAP) feature of Springer journals=.

In terms of publication, each of the articles tagged for appearance in a particular Topical Collection will be grouped with others that share similar thematic content.  This feature is shared with Special Issues.  However, unlike Special Issues, articles within a Topical Collection are not intended to be published together in a single print issue.  Rather, they will be identified collectively on the JHB website through an electronic tag associated with a particular Topical Collection.  Individual articles will appear in regular print of JHB, but they will be identified on the title page as being associated with a Topical Collection.  Thus, the publication of Topical Collection articles will afford authors additional attention and, moreover, will enable articles to avoid some of the timing delays associated with Special Issues, whose appearance is tied to the timing required for each article to move independently through the review process.  Articles published in a Topical Collection can appear in print and be consumed by interested scholars more quickly.  

We are excited by this new feature and look forward to encouraging more publications in areas of scholarship that we believe may serve to expand the boundaries of the discipline of the history of biology.

Please read our Author Instructions for Topical Collections (this opens in a new tab) to get further information about the submission, review and publishing process of Topical Collections.

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