Tag Archives: Marine Mammal Science Journal

Marine Mammal Science is now online only!

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A friendly reminder from the Society for Marine Mammalogy

Are you wondering why you have not received a copy of Marine Mammal Science in the mail recently?

Two years ago, the majority of Society members voted during the annual April ballot in favor of switching to an electronic-only journal and eliminating the printed version. There was an announcement of this on the Society’s website for several months, but it is possible you missed it if you do not periodically check the site and did not attend the annual member’s meeting at the biennial conference. It took some time to plan for the transition, and now it has become a reality.

At present, you will not automatically receive e-mail notices when a new issue of the journal is out, although we are looking into whether we might get this changed. Regardless, Marine Mammal Science will continue to be published quarterly (January, April, July and October), and if you sign up for e-mail alerts, Wiley will automatically e-mail you when a new issue is released.

If you used the online version of the journal in the past, you will already know that you must go to Marine Mammal Science through the Society’s website while logged in as a member. This will give you full access to the journal as part of your Society of Marine Mammalogy membership benefits. If you try to log in to Marine Mammal Science directly through wileyonline.com, you will not succeed in obtaining access to articles by using your SMM member ID and password. Of course many of you can also gain access to the journal through an institutional membership if your institution has paid to have access.

Is Marine Mammal Science still the same as before?

Yes! The journal will continue to operate as it has, maintaining the high standards it has had for papers being accepted.

Having more pages available to publish does not diminish the need to keep Marine Mammal Science as a high quality journal. Indeed, we still cannot possibly publish all papers submitted, so we must also select papers to consider based on their relative importance and likely degree of interest to the readership of the journal.

Benefits to having an entirely electronic journal:

1) We now publish a greater number of pages without a change in membership fees (now 1600 pages per year, up from 1000)

2) Allows colored figures in papers without charge to authors (previously it cost $600 per printed color figure)

3) Eliminates charges for mailing copies of issues to members

4) Eliminates issues getting lost in the mail (as was a common occurrence in the past)

5) Contributes to conservation by saving trees and eliminating the carbon cost of shipping print copies all over the world

If you have not already done so, we invite you to read our first two electronic-only journal issues published January and April 2014.

If you have questions about this change or about Marine Mammal Science in general, you can e-mail me at mmsci@megalink.net.

Daryl J. Boness
Editor-in-Chief
Marine Mammal Science

Update on Marine Mammal Science from the Editor-in-Chief

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I have two important announcements to make about the Society’s journal, Marine Mammal Science.

First, it is that time of year when Thomson’s ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) releases its latest Journal Impact Factor (IF; note that IF always lags by a year so the latest is for 2012) scores based on its Journal Citation Report. The impact factor for a journal is calculated based on a three-year period, and can be considered to be the average number of times published papers are cited up to two years after publication.

The 2012 IF for Marine Mammal Science is 2.128. This compares with last year’s value of 1.611 and a previous high of 1.787 in 2007.

The journal also increased in rank among both Zoology and Marine and Freshwater Biology journals. It currently ranks 26 out of 149 among Zoology journals and 30 out of 100 among Marine and Freshwater Biology journals. Rankings from last year were 38 out of 146 and 41 out of 97, respectively.

The second announcement is that as of the first issue of 2014, Marine Mammal Science will only be published electronically. There will no longer be printed versions of the journal.

This change follows on the vote last year by Society members in support of such a change. The change to electronic publication only will not change the volume and issue structure of the journal. Each year will be a new volume and there will be four issues published in 2014.

We will examine whether the journal could sustain six issues per year/volume in the future. One outcome of this change is that the journal will increase the number of pages published per year. This will ultimately relieve the back log of papers waiting to be published.

Of course another outcome will be that the Society will be “greener” in publishing its journal by reducing the need for paper.

Daryl J. Boness
Editor-in-Chief
Marine Mammal Science

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