Four years ago, the open access journal Nature Conservation was born to address the need for a stronger link between science, policy makers and management in the name of applied biodiversity conservation. Launched by Pensoft, it has been devoted to publishing timely, high-quality and innovative papers with clear practical relevance.
On celebrating its anniversary, the journal is proud to issue an Editorial marking its steady and promising growth in publications, authors and readers alike.
The Nature Conservation team believes that in order to finally bridge the knowledge-implementation gap, a serious issue emphasized back in 2010 at the Convention on Biological Diversity, Nagoya, research on natural resource management needs to be communicated to the relevant practitioners and policy makers.
Nature Conservation website homepage. Credit: Nature Conservation and Pensoft Publishers
"The task is to bring different specialists together and create a forum that supports knowledgeable practices, and to learn from the experience - successes and failures - of all parties," stress the founders and publishers behind Nature Conservation.
Over the last four years, Nature Conservation managed to overcome the challenges faced by many journals.
"In the first three years it was challenging to obtain a sufficient number of articles that were both scientifically of high quality and at the same time relevance for nature conservation" Editor-in-chief Prof. Klaus Henle from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research says.
However, over the years, authors from more than 38 countries from across the globe have submitted their manuscripts, resulting in the annual total of publications for 2015 being almost double compared to 2011. In the meantime, Nature Conservation was accepted for tracking by two of the largest abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed literature Thomson Reuters' Web-of-Science and Scopus, which is likely to result in even higher submission rate in the coming years.
Proud of Nature Conservation's achievements, its founders have listed the most productive authors, the most active editors and reviewers, as well as a list of the most frequently read papers on the journal's homepage.
Thanks to the joint efforts of the Nature Conservation team and external contributors alike, the journal has managed to make a name for itself on the science scene because of its excellent content.
Such is the case of the study into the illegal trade of Indian Star tortoises across Asia, conducted by Dr. Neil D'Cruze and his team, which gained a significant popularity via news outlets counting, among others, The Guardian; National Geographic and Science News Magazine.
source: Pensoft Publishers