Editorial Board Policies

There is an attempt to keep Editorial Board Policies to a minimum. The journal Editorial Board has prepared the following policies with the intention of honoring the Mission and Guiding Philosophies of the journal.

Comments on these policies are appreciated and reviewed annually by the Editorial Board.

• The purpose of the journal is to publish original work in the area of ethnobiology. This may be research, cultural expressions, curriculum development or studies, applied experiences, and commentaries on ethnobiology including editorials.
• The journal will not publish:
  • simple reviews of literature that lack theoretical or metadata analysis.
  • previously published articles.
  • materials lacking a "cultural" element (for example work that is actually pharmacology, pharmacognosy, horticulture, biogeography, etc.) that is often represented by original content from members of some particular culture.
• All published content will be reviewed by appropriate "peers" selected by the editors, however authors are encouraged to provide recommendations for reviewers in order to assist the editors.
• The journal will publish in any media.
• The journal will publish current scientific nomenclature and not propagate old terminology. This means that in some cases scientific names submitted by authors will be updated to currently accepted names even though these are not the names being used in their particular regional floras. This is true for binomials, families, etc.
  • The Angiosperm Phylogeny Working Group will serve as the basis for plant family decisions. (see Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (2003). An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG II. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 141: 399-436.
  • Constantly updated on-line internationally accessible databases will serve as the primary source of reference to primary literature, e.g., Tropicos: www.tropicos.org

In order to be considered for publication as original research a manuscript must meet the following requirements:

• Work must have a purpose (driving hypothesis, objective, community goal, etc.)
• Methods used must be clearly cited and reproducible.
• All plants that are cited as part of original research must be represented by voucher specimens that were collected as part of the research itself and are deposited in an internationally recognized herbarium. If plant information was collected from informants then it is reasonable to expect that the voucher specimens were specifically identified by the informants.
• Graphic content may not be used from any other source without explicit permission (for example maps, photos and other figures) from the copy write holder (author/publisher).

Potential authors are encouraged to examine the other tabs to the left to see the protocol that the ERA editors and staff use in processing of manuscripts since this can be informative in preparation of a higher quality manuscript, improving its likelihood of acceptance and speed of production into a final published document.

The editorial board meets periodically when one or more issues need to be discussed. Meetings are either electronic or in person at a scientific meeting that the board members are attending. The most common meeting venue has been the annual meetings of the Society for Economic Botany (the primary founding organization).