Special Issues

ERA "Special Issues"

1. Crops and Cultures in the Pacific. 6 articles edited by Barbara Pickersgill, in Volume 2, 2004

2. Working Forests in the Tropics. 9 articles edited by R. John Stepp and Jeffrey B. Luzar, in Volume 5, 2007

3. Banana Domestication. 13 articles edited by Tim Denham, Edmond De Langhe and Luc Vrydaghs, in Volume 7, 2009

Consideration of Special Issues

Special Issues are periodically published under certain conditions:

  • Proposed special issue editor(s) must submit a brief proposal to the ERA editor that includes the content of the issue (list of proposed authors and articles) as well as a plan for: 1) peer review of each manuscript that will include independent critique using ERA standards by at least three qualified reviewers (these may include some of the same group of authors), and 2) a article authored by the special issue editor(s) that will serve as an editorial or synopsis of the set of articles uniting them in a theme.
  • The special issue and all of its accepted manuscripts must fit within the same editorial board policy requirements for acceptable manuscripts as any other ERA manuscripts.
  • Any manuscripts that are not accepted by the peer review process will be expected to be rejected or accepted with corrections that are completed before final submission.

Special Issue editor responsibilities and work flow

The Editor(s) of each special issue need to ensure that in addition to the above peer review, each of the following aspects is completed prior to submission of the articles to ERA for conversion into articles.

  • Once the entire review process is completed then authors should be instructed to log into the ERA website, prepare an author file, and upload their final document. All figures should be uploaded as separate files in original highest quality format and not be embedded within lower quality media such as Word or .pdf documents. Please note that maps are the most common problematic submissions that are corrected by our copy editors so these submissions may need to be carefully examined.
  • It is helpful if authors include a very brief cover letter or statement that indicates that they are part of the special issue so that the editor on duty does not route the manuscript to reviewers.
  • During the process of preparation of manuscripts as galleys, one or more of the ERA editors will work with the special editor(s) as intermediaries between the authors. This requires that the special editor(s) be available/accessible during that period of time and committed to working through copy editing problems with the authors and ERA editorial staff.
  • As manuscripts are converted into galleys and receive each author's approval, they will be placed on hold until the final manuscript in the special issue is completed. Since it is easy for one author to greatly delay publication of an entire special issue, the ERA journal will not apply page numbers and will continue to publish other articles that are not part of the special issue until the final author has completed their work and the issue is ready for press.
  • It is possible to establish a target publication date and hold a set of completed manuscripts for that date.
  • It is possible to publish a set of manuscripts as both on-line and traditional, paper documents since ERA does all of the type-setting that is required for printing except for the cover pages.