Open minded and open access: introducing NeoBiota, a new peer-reviewed journal of biological invasions

Abstract

The Editorial presents the focus, scope, policies, and the inaugural issue of NeoBiota, a new open access peer-reviewed journal of biological invasions. The new journal NeoBiota is a continuation of the former NEOBIOTA publication series. The journal will deal with all aspects of invasion biology and impose no restrictions on manuscript size neither on use of color. NeoBiota implies an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and dissemination, such as semantic markup of and enhancements to published texts, data publication, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources

The first steps towards unifying concepts in invasion ecology were made one hundred years ago: revisiting the work of the Swiss botanist Albert Thellung

“…Invasion success and impacts can clearly vary among different environmental conditions (Fischer et al ., ; Jäger et al ., ; de Moura Queirós et al ., ), and exploring this kind of context dependence is still an intriguing research topic in invasion science (Kühn et al ., ). Thellung was already fully aware that environmental conditions are major drivers of invasion success.…”

“…Thellung promoted very successfully a concept to classify non‐native species according to three main criteria, which are still in the centre of invasion science (Blackburn et al ., ; Kühn et al ., ): (i) the stage of the invasion process, (ii) the main pathway of introduction (deliberate versus accidental) and (iii) the temporal differentiation between old and young introductions.…”

Ballast-borne marine invasive species: exploring the risk to coastal Alaska, USA

“…This would also support already existing and worthwhile initiatives, while enabling innovative communication methods and relevant services for all interested bodies, in particular the scientists and citizen scientists who both provide and use IAS-related data and other research outputs. In this regard, existing thematic open access journals (Kühn et al 2011;Panov et al 2011;Lucy and Panov 2012;Campbell 2013) may serve as a core element for such an initiative, with the ultimate aim of developing a widely sustainable network of networks on IAS.…”

Invasion science, ecology and economics: seeking roads not taken

“…As members of the editorial board of Neobiota who, for various reasons, didn't get our names on the original editorial (Kühn et al 2011), we would like to add a coda to it. Even though there were 38 bullet points listing areas in invasion science where more work is needed, we would like to mention additional areas that we hope would be addressed in future issues of Neobiota.…”