The International Association of Vegetation Science (IAVS) will continue its financial support to society members in 2024, who wish to publish their studies in the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal. The IAVS and the VCS Chief Editors remain committed to providing equitable access to publishing in the field of plant community ecology, while ensuring the sustainability of the journal beyond its launching phase.
Based on suggestions of the journal’s Chief Editors and the IAVS Publications Committee, the IAVS Governing Board has approved a new scheme of article processing charges (APCs) for 2024.
According to the new scheme, which will apply to manuscripts submitted to VCS from 1st January 2024 onwards, papers first-authored by IAVS members living and working in lower- and middle-income countries will remain completely exempt from APCs.
Meanwhile, first authors from upper-income countries will benefit from an 85% discount on the regular APCs. However, if they have access to funding from their universities or scientific projects, they are strongly encouraged to pay the regular APCs in full, so that they can support underprivileged colleagues.
“Like all journals, the IAVS gold open access (OA) journal Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) needs to collect the costs of publishing from some source, be it authors, readers, research institutions or the IAVS budget,” remind the VCS Chief Editors.
“In 2024, we offer to publish free of charge for authors from all lower- and middle-income countries (149 countries) and for a very low APC of only 300 EUR for upper-income countries (80 countries). However, this generous offer to IAVS members is only possible, if a moderate number of authors are able and willing to pay relatively high APCs of EUR 2,000 per article (albeit still lower than in many other ecological journals).”
The 2024 APC scheme, the VCS Chief Editors further explain, has been set with the double aim of reducing the annual subsidies by IAVS successively, and keeping the financial publication barriers to authors as low as possible.
“Many thanks to all those whose APC payments allow us to remove publication barriers as far as possible from our authors,” the VCS Chief Editors add.
The VCS Chief Editors also encourage IAVS members to submit manuscripts to VCS that develop or employ vegetation classification systems with any method and at any spatial scale.
Apart from regular research papers, they remind, VCS also publishes unique article types, such as Reviews and Syntheses, Forum Papers, methodological papers (a.k.a. VCS Methods) and Reports.
There are permanent sections on “Ecoinformatics” and “Phytosociological Nomenclature” and four ongoing special collections, dedicated to Latin American vegetation; African vegetation; Asian grasslands; and European forests and forest edge vegetation; which are managed in collaboration with three Regional Sections and two Working Groups of the IAVS.
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For details about the article processing charges (APCs) at the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal, please visit this journal page. Manuscripts submitted by 31st December 2023 and first-authored by any IAVS member will be published free of charge.
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To find more about the permanent and special article collections at VCS, please refer to this journal page.
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