Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS): IAVS members can still publish for free

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Prepared by Jürgen Dengler (on behalf of all VCS Chief Editor)

At the IAVS Symposium in Coffs Harbour this summer, the IAVS Council decided to continue the financial support for its gold open-access journal Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS). Accordingly, papers first authored by IAVS members and submitted until the end of 2023 remain fully exempt from article processing charges (APCs). By contrast, the APCs for non-IAVS members have been increased to reduce the subsidies to be paid by IAVS as far as possible (https://vcs.pensoft.net/about#Article-Processing-Charges). We also encourage IAVS members with access to APC funds to pay the full fees rather than to apply for exemption – in order to save money from the IAVS. From 2024 onwards, it is planned to introduce APCs also for IAVS members from high-income countries, but still with a substantial discount compared to the regular APCs to maintain an incentive to join our mother organisation. Details will be decided and communicated later. However, the APC scheme valid at the original submission date will always be applied.

We thus encourage IAVS members to submit interesting manuscripts to VCS that develop or employ vegetation classification systems with any method and at any spatial scale. Besides regular research papers, VCS also offers Reviews and Syntheses, Forum Papers, methodological papers (“VCS Methods”) and Reports. There are Permanent Sections on “Ecoinformatics” and “Phytosociological Nomenclature” and four ongoing Special Collections in collaboration with three Regional Sections and two Working Groups of IAVS (see https://vcs.pensoft.net/collections).

Among the benefits of publishing in VCS are:

  • High visibility through open access
  • Full colour
  • Linguistic editing free of charge for accepted articles by authors who are not native speakers of English
  • Included in the Scopus bibliometric database with a current Cite Score Tracker of 2.4

We look forward to your submission!