To celebrate the 360th anniversary of the Philosophical Transactions, we have invited Guest Editors Roel van Klink and Julie Koch Sheard to tell us what publishing with the journal means to them.
We compiled a theme Issue on modern approaches to insect monitoring, featuring methodological, ecological, and review papers. The idea for it emerged from a workshop we organized in Hannover, Germany, where we invited experts developing different technologies for insect monitoring to share their knowledge and experiences. This made it clear to us that many exciting technologies were being developed in parallel, but that a space for exchanging ideas across fields was missing.
We are extremely proud to have published such a rich collection of papers in the oldest scientific journal of the world. We chose Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B because of its excellent reputation and the interdisciplinary nature of our compilation, featuring ecologists, geneticists, computer scientists and physicists. It is hard to imagine a more fitting journal and we want to thank Helen Eaton for guiding us through the process and keeping us on track.
For the two of us, it was a great learning experience, as we had little editorial experience before editing this volume. While the editorial process proved quite time demanding, it was for us also an opportunity to get a view from the other side of the publishing table and to grow our scientific networks. We had quite a large editorial team, of 6 people, which allowed us to learn a lot from the more experienced team members. It was very rewarding to see the Theme Issue taking shape and getting closer and closer to our vision of a compendium of modern insect monitoring.
We also had great experiences interacting with the authors. We really made an effort to include researchers with different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. For example, we included many early career researchers, scientists working with the incredibly rich tropical insect diversity, and researchers from different disciplines, using different technologies. Overall, this editorial experience was extremely rewarding. Since its publication in May 2024, the Editorial of the Theme Issue has been downloaded over 3800 times from countries all over the world, which underlines the broad reach of the journal.
In the current publishing landscape, where there is an overabundance of journals, many of which have questionable practices for acquiring submissions, the society journals, including those of the Royal Society, are like a beacon for good scholarly practice. We really appreciate that we could contribute to this tradition and hope that the society journals will survive under increasing competitive pressure from large, commercial publishing houses. We found the entire experience rewarding and enjoyable and would happily publish with Philosophical Transactions again.
Visit our anniversary page for more content celebrating 360 years of publishing.
