The 10th Volume of Chelonian Conservation and Biology: Celebrating the Past and Looking to the Future
You now have in front of you the first issue of Volume 10 of Chelonian Conservation and Biology, our 27th issue overall since our start-up 18 years ago in 1993. Indeed this is a momentous occasion for the journal, and one that is quite gratifying to the entire editorial team at CCB. It's also an ideal opportunity to reflect on the history of CCB, celebrating our successes over the years and noting the changes that have taken place. Likewise, it is a fantastic opportunity to look to the future and welcome the changes that are ahead of us, some of which are announced later on in this introduction. Chelonian Conservation and Biology (CCB) is truly the International Journal of Turtle and Tortoise Research. We are the only international scientific peer-reviewed journal of cosmopolitan and broad-based coverage of all aspects of conservation and biology of all chelonians, including freshwater turtles, marine turtles, and tortoises. As always, we strive to serve as a venue for a variety of biological and conservation studies, while at the same time encouraging submissions and publication from underrepresented and developing regions as well as emerging leaders in turtle conservation and biology.
We've always tried to provide focus on key species that need additional conservation attention. Indeed, CCB was the first journal to dedicate its pages exclusively to a specific species, and these Special Focus Issues have helped shed light on species in need on six occasions, including special issues or sections that have focused on hawksbills (Eretmochelys imbricata, 1999), Blanding's turtles (Emydoidea blandingii, 2000), gopherine tortoises (Gopherus spp., 2002) Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii, 2005), and leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea, 1996, 2007). We have always felt that such special issues are vital to build conservation momentum for species or taxa in need of conservation. After all, getting the biological information into hands of those that can translate it into conservation action is paramount to a healthy linkage for chelonian conservation and biology. Based on the citation history of these special focus issues, we are on the right track: the 1996 Leatherback Special Issue remains the most highly cited of all CCB issues.
One of CCB's most important developments over the years was to enter into a co-publishing agreement between Chelonian Research Foundation and Allen Press in 2006, starting with Volume 5 and never looking back. This paid substantial dividends in that, for the first time, it allowed CCB to obtain an Impact Factor. The Thomson Reuters ISI Journal Citation Reports shows that the Impact Factor for CCB jumped from 0.692 in 2007 to 1.294 in 2008. That year, CCB ranked 47th out of 125 zoology journals and had the second highest Impact Factor of the American herpetological-focused journals. As a result, the volume of manuscripts submitted for consideration for publication has greatly increased, and we are currently processing about 80 manuscripts annually.
Even with our excellent Impact Factor, CCB is much more about the people involved—the Editorial Team, the Authors, and you, the readers. For the Co-Editors, this marks the 6-year anniversary of Seminoff's involvement, joining Founding Editor Rhodin, and together we've seen the journal continue to improve in many respects. We continue to benefit from the sage wisdom and support of our Consulting Editors, Peter Pritchard and Russ Mittermeier. Responding to the need for increased capacity of CCB's editorial team, we established three new Associate Editor positions in 2009 and welcomed aboard Jeffrey Lovich, Arthur Georges, and Bryan Wallace to assist with the editorial processing of the growing number of papers. These changes helped improve our turnaround time for manuscript submissions, but with the pace of submissions continuing to increase, we've again restructured our Editorial Team. We now welcome Jeffrey Lovich and Peter Lindeman as Co-Editors, to compose an expanded Co-Editorial team of Seminoff, Lovich, Lindeman, and Rhodin. We'll also lean more heavily on our dedicated group of Associate Editors that already included Wallace and Georges, and now joined also by Luca Luiselli. What do these changes mean? Simply put, it's a way for us to provide more prompt service and peer review management to the submitters of manuscripts, without whom we could not maintain CCB. We believe these changes will assist us as we continue to work toward faster turn-around of submitted papers, and with an expanded Editorial Team, now including more than 40 members of the Review Board, we can focus more on thinking of new ways to evolve and improve CCB into the future.
Looking to the Future
As we look beyond Volume 10, one of our principal goals is to continue to provide a publication venue for researchers and research from underrepresented regions. To this end, we will continue to engage as many authors from as many regions as possible. From an operational standpoint, we're working hard to increase the turnaround time from submission to editorial decision. As such, we're hopeful that more rapid acceptance of papers will allow authors to cite their material as ‘In Press’ more readily. And for those papers that are ultimately published, we envision a more broad acceptance of color images and figures for PDF versions of papers (due to costs, we'll continue to limit what gets printed in color). If all goes according to plan, we will see more pages per volume in the coming years. This will of course depend on demand for CCB, the total annual submissions, and subscribership revenues. However, we're moving in the right track along these lines and are seeing greater submission rates than ever before, with increased institutional and online subscriptions.
We will continue to publish state-of-the-art research on the biology and conservation of freshwater turtles, tortoises, and marine turtles in a variety of areas. Specifically, we aim to shed increasing light on the biology and conservation of those species most in need of protection and recovery, especially those on the verge of extinction. Leading candidates for this increased focus are headlined in our recent publication by Chelonian Research Foundation and partners, “Turtles in Trouble: The World's 25+ Most Endangered Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles—2011 (by the Turtle Conservation Coalition; pdf available at www.iucn-tftsg.org/trouble). For marine turtles, we would like to serve as an upper-shelf venue for publication of demographic information that is useful for status assessments such as those conducted for the IUCN Red List and the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Turtle conservation around the world is now more multidisciplinary than ever; often engaging sea turtle biologists, wildlife managers, economists, and policy experts to address the growing challenges. Volume 10 Issue 1 before you does a superb job of both underscoring this multidisciplinary nature and highlighting the fact that turtle research and conservation is a global community. And balancing this perspective among the three turtle groups is vital for us to serve as the voice for all things turtle. We believe this issue has done an excellent job in all respects. Of the 20 articles, 8 focus on freshwater turtles, 7 on marine turtles, and 5 on tortoises. These articles cover an array of topics, including ecology, systematics, contaminants, conservation, reproduction, sex determination, orientation, breeding and husbandry, pathology, physiology, morphology, and wildlife management. With 11 countries represented in this volume (Barbados, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Greece, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nigeria, Seychelles, USA), spanning five continents, Chelonian Conservation and Biology is now, more than ever, the International Journal of Turtle and Tortoise Research.
