Journal Guide

About the Journal.

As of January 2013 Evolution: Education & Outreach is a peer-reviewed open access journal published under the brand SpringerOpen. From 2013 onward all new articles published in the journal are freely and permanently available online for anyone, anywhere and at any time. This journal promotes accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience. Evolution: Education and Outreach addresses the question of why we should care about evolution by exploring the practical applications of evolutionary principles in daily life and the impact of evolutionary theory on culture and society throughout history. Targeting K-16 students, teachers and scientists alike, the journal presents articles to aid members of these communities in the teaching of evolutionary theory. It connects teachers with scientists by adapting cutting-edge, peer reviewed articles for classroom use on varied instructional levels. The journal features multi-authored papers written by teachers and scientists and offers teaching tools such as unit and lesson plans and classroom activities, as well as additional online content such as podcasts and powerpoint presentations.

Evolution, published for the Society for the Study of Evolution, is the premier publication devoted to the study of organic evolution and the integration of the various fields of science concerned with evolution. The journal presents significant and original results that extend our understanding of evolutionary phenomena and processes.

Evolutionary Anthropology is an authoritative review journal that focuses on issues of current interest in biological anthropology, paleoanthropology, archaeology, functional morphology, social biology, and bone biology - including dentition and osteology - as well as human biology, genetics, and ecology. In addition to lively, well-illustrated articles reviewing contemporary research efforts, this journal also publishes general news of relevant developments in the scientific, social, or political arenas. Reviews of noteworthy new books are also included, as are letters to the editor and listings of various conferences. The journal provides a valuable source of current information for classroom teaching and research activities in evolutionary anthropology.

Evolutionary Applications is a fully peer reviewed open access journal. It publishes papers that utilize concepts from evolutionary biology to address biological questions of health, social and economic relevance. Papers are expected to employ evolutionary concepts or methods to make contributions to areas such as (but not limited to): medicine, agriculture, forestry, exploitation and management (fisheries and wildlife), aquaculture, conservation biology, environmental sciences (including climate change and invasion biology), microbiology, and toxicology. All taxonomic groups are covered from microbes, fungi, plants and animals. In order to better serve the community, we also now strongly encourage submissions of papers making use of modern molecular and genetic methods (population and functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenetics, quantitative genetics, association and linkage mapping) to address important questions in any of these disciplines and in an applied evolutionary framework. Theoretical, empirical, synthesis or perspective papers are welcome.

Evolutionary Applications is now part of the Wiley Open Access publishing program of fully open access journals published by Wiley. For further information visit the Wiley Open Access website.

An international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on evolutionary bioinformatics. There is growing awareness that to understand organismal form and function, through the use of molecular, genetic, genomic, and proteomic data, due consideration must be given to an organism's evolutionary context - history constrains the path an organism is obliged to take, and leaves an indelible mark on its component parts. Evolutionary Bioinformatics publishes papers on all aspects of computational evolutionary biology and evolutionary bioinformatics.

Now in an exciting new journal format, Evolutionary Biology is dedicated to the view that evolutionary theory is a unifying framework for the biosciences. The journal is a forum in which critical reviews, original research, commentaries, and controversial views are brought together to contribute to greater understanding of the origins and diversity of life. This vision reflects the original intent of the serial publication Evolutionary Biology, first published in 1967 as a forum in which some of the most important papers in Evolutionary Biology appeared. The topics varied greatly and many of the papers were synthetic in nature. Although some existing journals deal with various facets of evolutionary biology, Evolutionary Biology fills the need for a journal which remains true to the vision and intent laid out by Dobzhansky et al. but that is adapted to today's publication environment. Evolutionary Biology provides a focal point for broad syntheses, in-depth treatment and controversial ideas. Indexed in: Scien

g the exchange of information among researchers involved in both the theoretical and practical aspects of computational systems drawing their inspiration from nature. Particular emphasis is placed on evolutionary models of computation such as genetic algorithms (GA), evolutionary strategies (ES), classifier systems (CS), evolutionary programming (EP), genetic programming (GP), and related fields such as swarm intelligence (Ant Colony Optimization and Particle Swarm Optimization), and other evolutionary computation techniques.

New Focus for our Journal The relationship between Ecology and Evolution is both intimate and fundamental, yet the field of Evolutionary Ecology is not a strong or obvious focus of research activity. Habitats and climate have been changing at various temporal and spatial scales since the origin of life. Although this variation can have a profound effect on both ecological and evolutionary processes, the interplay between ecology and evolution remains comparatively neglected. Most researchers in evolution are more concerned with the pattern of evolution (phylogeny) and its genetic and developmental correlates than with the ecological causes of evolution. Similarly, ecologists often ignore the evolutionary implications of population and community processes, at least partially because it is difficult enough working out ecological processes when one assumes (implicitly) that all individuals are identical over short time scales. These cartoons of ecology and evolution reflect a fundamental gap in both subject mat

Welcome! Evolutionary Ecology Researchis a professional scientific journal focusing on the overlap between ecology and evolution.

Evolutionary Intelligence is an international journal devoted to the publication and dissemination of theoretical and practical aspects of the use of population-based search for artificial intelligence. Techniques of interest include evolving rule-based systems, evolving artificial neural networks, evolving fuzzy systems, evolving Bayesian and statistical approaches, artificial immune systems, and hybrid systems which combine evolutionary computation with other A.I. techniques in general. The journal contains research papers, review articles, short notes and letters to the editor. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, memory, vision, planning, knowledge representation and construction, robotics, neuroscience, language, development and learning, and all aspects of cognitive science. Papers describing applications in areas such as data mining, adaptive control, medical and bio-informatics, games and multi-media, agent-based computing and modelling, complex systems, and chemical and biological systems are also welcomed. The journal intends to capture and archive the advancement in the field of evolutionary intelligence in a timely manner and in one place.

In debates about scientific publishing over recent years it has been noted many times that the authors of articles for peer-reviewed journals write primarily for ‘research impact’. Unfortunately, established practices, which involve transferring copyright to journal publishers, often achieve precisely the opposite of impact. Many worthy papers appear in small-circulation journals where they languish unnoticed by all but a few who could profit from the ideas they contain. Many specialist journals have fewer than 1000 subscribers, and even very popular journals fewer than 5000. For those interested in evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior the situation is particularly difficult in that our universities are divided into traditional disciplines that have little coherence when the questions under consideration concern fields as diverse as biology, philosophy, economics, neuroscience, history, and psychology. Our professional bodies also reflect arbitrary divisions of inquiry, with the added impediment that they are often concerned more with local (national) political and legal matters than with the dissemination of knowledge.Of course, since the advent of the Internet, and especially the world wide web, access to information has been transformed, but many of the old barriers remain in place. Although many newspapers make their content freely available, the cost of a journal article published online by a traditional publisher can be more than the price of a textbook, and some publishers do not allow access to individual papers without a full subscription to the print journal. Stevan Harnad notes that, There are currently at least 20,000 refereed journals across all fields of scholarship, publishing more than 2 million refereed articles each year. The amount collectively paid by those of the world’s institutions which can afford the tolls for just one of those refereed papers averages $2,000 per paper. In exchange for that fee, that particular paper is accessible to readers at those, and only those, paying institutions.The internet provides an international readership larger than even the largest circulation journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, and New Scientist. The journal has distinguished participants and readers in over 160 countries, and at most major universities and research institutes worldwide.As Evolutionary Psychology has a broad scope covering empirical, philosophical, historical, and socio-political perspectives it has a large and diverse editorial board composed of distinguished and enthusiastic individuals who wish to encourage appropriate submissions across all relevant fields, including original research papers, subject reviews, topic reviews, and book reviews. Each item is published as it is available, with appropriate links being posted to all of our groups and websites. Each item is published in PDF format. This allows articles to be cited as easily as a paper in a hardcopy journal, and also allows for dissemination of material via email to colleagues and interested parties worldwide. This mode of operation will afford authors unparalleled exposure and hence maximum research impact. Contributors are also be encouraged to deposit their work in appropriate eprint archives. To quote Steve Harnad again, Learned inquiry, always communal and cumulative, will not only be immeasurably better informed, new findings percolating through minds and media almost instantaneously, but it will also become incomparably more interactive.In his article ‘Is your journal really necessary?’ Declan Butler of Nature writes: The possibilities of sophisticated matching of personalized editorial selections across large swathes of the literature, and the need to lower barriers to access, should in themselves be sufficient to convince scientists tempted to create low-circulation print journals to consider web-only options. Arguments that electronic-only will hinder access of developing countries to science is nonsense. The reality is that a library in Kinshasa would be lucky if it could afford to subscribe to a handful of print journals; the web promises developing countries access to scientific information they could previously only have dreamed of. But the essential function of a journal is to serve a particular community. The next web revolution will be a plethora of next-generation communities linking papers, people and data. So next time you think about launching a print journal, unless you have sufficient readership to survive in a free competitive market, do your colleagues and science a favour by considering instead what your community needs, and launch the answer online. I predict that this change will occur in under five years; if I am wrong, I will eat my journal.We cordially invite you to join our international community of dedicated research scientists, scholars, and clinicians.