VCS is looking for new members of the Editorial Board

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

Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), the gold open-access journal of IAVS dedicated to developing and applying vegetation typologies as well as to ecoinformatics of vegetation, is growing. With its first Journal Impact Factor of 3.0 released a few weeks ago, its attractiveness to both authors and readers has further grown. Thus, we are seeking colleagues interested in serving on our Editorial Board. As we aim to be as diverse and dynamic as the vegetation on the globe, we particularly encourage people based outside Europe, early-career researchers and women to apply.

Our Editorial Board members provide volunteer service to the journal, both by their reviewing/editing services and by recommending the journal and its articles to other colleagues. We expect our Editorial Board members to be familiar with the scope and publishing practices of the journal. In exchange, we present the names of the Editorial Board members both online (https://vcs.pensoft.net/board/) and in the imprint of the journal. The Editorial Board members are invited to the editorial meetings of VCS and receive the VCS Newsletter, thus getting first-hand information on the journal development, and can contribute to the journal development with their own ideas. Being a member of an Editorial Board gives you first-hand experience on the peer review process and can serve as a plus in job applications.

We seek candidates for the following roles:

Editorial Review Board members need to have their PhD completed, have first- or last-author paper(s) on vegetation classification published in international journals and preferentially also some experience as peer reviewer.

Linguistic Editors are a relatively unique service of VCS to its many non-native speaking authors. After acceptance, their articles get professional linguistic editing for free. Linguistic Editors should be native speakers of English or have linguistic skills at a comparable level. They do not need to have a PhD, but should be well familiar with the style of scientific writing in ecology and botany.

Exceptionally, colleagues who previously successfully served as editors in other journals in the Web of Science can directly apply to become Associate Editors (while normally we select new Associate Editors from colleagues who did a good job as Guest Editors or Editorial Review Board Members).

Please send your application until 31 October 2025 to Jürgen Dengler (dr.juergen.dengler@gmail.com), with a cover letter that briefly explains why you are interested in joining the Editorial Board of this particular journal and specifying whether you apply for the Editorial Review Board, as Linguistic Editor or as Associate Editor. Please attach a short CV. If applying for the Editorial Review Board, we would like to specifically see your previous experience with (a) first-authored papers in English, (b) review service and (c) potentially also editor experiences. If you have a well-curated Web of Science Researcher (formerly Publons) profile (e.g. https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/765401), you could most conveniently send just a link to this. If applying as Linguistic Editor, please explain your previous experience in editing scientific texts linguistically.

Last but not least: If you have ideas to organise a Special Collection of papers within the scope of VCS, e.g. in conjunction with a conference, you are most welcome to contact one of the Chief Editors to discuss options.