Editorial

This is my second editorial for Invertebrate Systematics and it has been two great years working with this incredible team of editors and publishers. Since I last addressed you, we have had five new editors join the team with taxonomic expertise in sponges, cnidarians, meiofauna, and insects and we continue to expand our editorial team as needed. The journal has accepted more articles in 2017 than ever before, and their quality continues to increase. This is therefore the first of a series of extra-large issues while trying to reduce the time from acceptance to publication, which is the last hurdle we needed to solve in order to make the publishing experience in our journal as best as we possibly can. The editors have worked extremely hard to reduce the time to first decision, and the production team has tried to keep up with an increasing number of long manuscripts while providing the in-house services that make Invertebrate Systematics so special. The next step was thus to reduce the time to print, and we sincerely hope that we can get up to speed by the middle of 2018. To those who have been waiting for their papers to appear in print, we just wanted to ask for a bit of extra patience. We believe that the end product will be worth it.

We continue to strongly believe that the most important aspect of our journal is its quality. Quality of papers and submissions has been a priority for the journal, and thus I have returned a good number of manuscript without review. Quality of the review process has benefited from more transparency and feedback to the reviewers, who continue to do an impressive work despite the many demands to work altruistically for all sort of journals that we are all asked to do. At CSIRO we have discussed incentives which I hope we can provide to our own reviewers soon. Quality of the editorial process has dictated the increase in the number of Editors, to maximize a match of expertise and minimize work overload. Quality of the production process is finally the trademark of our journal. I sincerely hope that our authors and readers feel the same way, but if you do not, please, continue to give us feedback so we can improve. Which takes me to the last point. We want to continue improving in every aspect of the journal. Our impact factor continues to be above 2 for the third year in a row, we think because of the important papers we receive and publish. Let’s keep up with this trend, and please, send us your most exciting research on invertebrate systematics, biogeography, or theoretical developments. We will continue to do our best to make sure that your manuscript turns into a beautiful publication.

Professor Gonzalo Giribet

Editor-in-Chief, Invertebrate Systematics