The International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) decided to launch a gold open-access academic journal, titled Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), last summer. IAVS, at that time, signed a contract with scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft and its self-developed innovative, fast-track scholarly platform ARPHA.
VCS is now officially online with the publication of its first six research articles and an exhaustive editorial, written by its four Chief Editors. They explain the mission and key features of the new journal, and address the advantages and challenges of Open Access and share the ways VCS is to handle those.
VCS focuses on vegetation typologies and vegetation classification systems, their methodological foundation, development and application at any organisational and spatial scale. No restrictions are imposed on the methodological approaches used.
Apart from original research papers that develop new vegetation typologies, the journal publishes applied studies that use such typologies, for example, in vegetation mapping, ecosystem modelling, nature conservation, land use management, or monitoring. Particularly encouraged are methodological studies that design and compare tools or algorithms for vegetation classification and mapping, vegetation databases and nomenclatural principles. Papers dealing with conceptual and theoretical bases of vegetation survey and classification can also be registered.
Amongst the appealing features of the new journal are its two permanent special collections: Ecoinformatics and Phytosociological Nomenclature. The former invites papers presenting vegetation-plot databases and other ecoinformatics data sources relevant for vegetation classification as well as concepts, methods and tools for using these, while the latter focuses on nomenclature issues of syntaxa.
Another novelty introduced by VCS is the implementation of double-blind peer review meant to reduce potential biases in academia. Proving the international focus of VCS, the first published articles cover research from five continents.
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