Jump into the future: Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift goes for advanced open access in its 157th publishing year

Dominique Zimmermann

doi:10.3897/dez.61.7967

Editorial

Jump into the future: Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift goes for advanced open access in its 157^th publishing year

Dominique Zimmermann^‡

‡ Natural History Museum Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Corresponding author: Dominique Zimmermann ( dominique.zimmermann@nhm-wien.ac.at )

Academic editor: Dominique Zimmermann

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: Zimmermann D (2014) Jump into the future: Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift goes for advanced open access in its 157 ^th publishing year. Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 61(1): 1-1. https://doi.org/10.3897/dez.61.7967

With the beginning of this year, the Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ), one of the world’s oldest entomology journals, became a front-line fighter of modern scientific publishing. The transfer to Pensoft, the new publisher, brings about changes, as I see it, all for the benefit of the scientific community.

Most obviously, all articles published in the DEZ will henceforth be open access. They thus will have a much wider coverage. This is not only of use for the authors who can freely share and promote their articles and hence benefit from increased citation rates and new collaboration opportunities, but for the whole scientific community as the articles become available to practically everyone, independently of access via a library or a university server. More and more taxonomic works are being published by experts from developing and transitional countries and open access is the only way to provide them with an open and efficient mechanism for exchange and growth of knowledge. Additionally, Pensoft ensures the visibility of published taxonomic information by distributing it to global portals, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Plazi Treatment Repository, the wiki treatment repository Species-ID, and many others. In addition, the authors are saved the bother of registering their new taxa with ZooBank due to the automated registration workflow firstly established by Pensoft. An important difference from most open access journals is that the open access to the two regular yearly issues of the DEZ is granted to the authors due to the generous support from the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

When I was invited to take over the editorship of the DEZ, it was the perspective of leading the journal into the modern publishing paths of Pensoft that excited me most. You may thus believe that I am proud and honoured to present you with the first issue in the new format. I am personally convinced that this publishing model is the only way to meet the challenges and demands of the present and the future. I thank the leadership of the Museum für Naturkunde and personally Prof. Dr. Johannes Vogel, the Director General, for their confidence and appreciate their commitment to the new path. My predecessor Prof. Dr. Hannelore Hoch has guided the DEZ to where it is now, a recognized systematic entomology journal, and I thank her for her support in continuing her work. Finally, I am glad that I could gather a highly dedicated and excellent editorial team to stand behind me, consisting of both long-serving and newly invited experts.

With this, I would like to invite colleagues from all around the world to enjoy the new publishing services of their well-known good “old” journal!