On the occasion of its 160 th birthday, Plant Ecology and Evolution gets a makeover

Brecht Verstraete

doi:10.5091/plecevo.84881

Editorial

On the occasion of its 160 ^th birthday, Plant Ecology and Evolution gets a makeover

Brecht Verstraete^‡

‡ Meise Botanic Garden, Meise, Belgium

Corresponding author: Brecht Verstraete ( brecht.verstraete@meisebotanicgarden.be )

Academic editor: Natacha Beau

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Verstraete B (2022) On the occasion of its 160^th birthday, Plant Ecology and Evolution gets a makeover. Plant Ecology and Evolution 155(2): 181-181. https://doi.org/10.5091/plecevo.84881

Plant Ecology and Evolution has a long and rich history and we celebrate its anniversary this year: it was established in 1862 as the journal of the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium, although under a different name. During its 160-year history, the journal has gone through many changes and the time has come for another major transformation.

The journal has dramatically increased its functionality by moving to the ARPHA publishing platform. We are now able to conduct the entire editorial process online: from submission of manuscripts to peer review, editing, publication, dissemination, and archiving. It offers a smooth and efficient experience to authors, reviewers, and editors by keeping everything within a single ecosystem.

At the same time, the website received a complete makeover and provides a pleasant environment to discover the latest studies on plant diversity. Papers are published in PDF, HTML, and XML format, which can all be accessed freely at https://plecevo.eu. Each paper now also has detailed real-time metrics that indicate its impact.

Open science is important to us and the ARPHA platform allows for easy and automatic dissemination of biodiversity data to various databases. In this way, we contribute to making scientific research and biodiversity data freely available to all.

You will be glad to hear that despite this major upgrade, our core values remain the same. Plant Ecology and Evolution remains a diamond open access journal, so there are no article processing fees and all papers are free to read. Our scope and our standard for high-quality research also remain unchanged.

We will also continue to share published research on social media and I encourage everyone to follow us on Twitter @plecevo and Facebook @plecevo. You can also sign up on our website to receive alerts when new papers are published.

I am excited for this new chapter for Plant Ecology and Evolution and I hope that you will find the changes useful. I am looking forward to welcoming your research in our new and improved journal.