Tropical Diversity (2019) 1(1): 1-4.

ISSN: 2596-2388.

EDITORIAL

Tropical Diversity

Edinaldo Nelson dos Santos Silva

, Veridiana Scudeller

, Mauro José Cavalcanti

Laboratório de Plâncton, Coordenação de Bidiversidade, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Av. André

Araújo, 2936, CEP 69060-000, Manaus, AM, Brazil. E-mail: nelson@inpa.gov.br

Laboratório de Botânica, Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Manaus, AM, Brazil. E-mail:

scudellerveridiana@hotmail.com

Ecoinformatics Studio, Caixa Postal 46521, CEP 20551-940, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. E-mail: maurobio@gmail.com

Introduction

The tropics have long fascinated

scientists, from both natural history and the social

sciences (Wallace, 1878; Dobzhansky, 1950;

Robinson, 1978; Janzen, 1986; Arnold, 2000).

Geographically located in a wide belt surrounding

the equator (Gritzner, 2007), the tropics

encompass all the large rain forests and coral

reefs, the most diverse and complex ecosystems in

the planet (Connell, 1978; Wilson, 1992).

Economically, the tropical regions are a rich

source of wood, products of pharmacological use,

rubber, and other raw materials crucial to industry

– what has turned its exploitation into a highly

profitable activity, especially in the last hundred

years of colonial expansion (Kidd, 1898).

Increasing pressures on tropical natural

resources are rapidly modifying or destroying

pristine areas and causing the extinction of animal

and plant species, in some cases even before they

are known (Prance, 1977; Raven, 1977; Lees &

Pimm, 2015).

Therefore, vehicles for fast publication, at

its all multiple levels, are much needed to allow

the timely dissemination of information on

tropical diversity (Jarvie & van Welzen, 1994), if

there is any hope to conserve and use it in

sustainable ways. In this sense, we see as most

opportune the creation of a new, dynamic, fast-

tracking scientific journal using the current tools

of information technology to achieve this goal.

Focus and Scope

Tropical Diversity is an online, open and

free access multidisciplinary journal that

publishes original articles, scientific notes, and

reviews on all aspects of biological and

sociocultural diversity in the tropics, in English,

Portuguese, or Spanish. The scope includes all

fields of theoretical and applied terrestrial and

aquatic (marine and freshwater) ecology, biology,

management, conservation, and social, economic,

political, and cultural aspects.

Santos-Silva et al. (2019)

Editorial

Open Peer Review Process

Each manuscript will be sent to at least

two peer reviewers for evaluation. The authors

can suggest possible reviewers (with their

contacts) or request that others be excluded. The

journal adopts an open review procedure,

therefore both the authors and the reviewers are to

be made known to each other, as these potentially

have a positive impact upon the quality of the

reviews, the recommendation regarding

publication, the tone of the review and the time

spent on reviewing (Walsh et al., 2000). Upon

acceptance of a manuscript, the Editor in Chief

will send the comments and recommendations of

the referees to the authors, for reformulation as

needed.

Open Access Policy

The journal provides immediate open

access to its content on the principle that making

research freely available to the public supports a

greater global exchange of knowledge. All articles

are published online with Open Access and

distributed under the terms of the Creative

Commons Attribution-Non-Comercial (CC BY-

NC) License.

Data Archiving

Because data are one of the most

important products of the scientific enterprise,

they should be preserved and usable for decades

in the future. The editors of Tropical Diversity

embrace an open access data policy and thus

requires, as a condition for publication, that all

data supporting the results in papers published in

this journal should be archived in appropriate

public archives, such as GenBank, Treebase,

Dryad, figshare, or any another archive of the

author's choice that provides comparable access

and guarantee of preservation. Authors may elect

to have the data made publicly available at time of

publication or, if the technology of the archive so

allows, they may opt to embargo access to the

data for a period of up to a year after publication.

Reproducible Research

The editors of Tropical Diversity are

committed to the concept of reproducible research

- the ability to recompute results of scientific

experiments and data analyses which is at the very

foundation of modern science (Gentleman, 2005;

Peng, 2011; Goodman et al., 2016). This involves

not only the scientific paper itself, but also the

data and computational environment used to

generate the reported results, so that they can be

reproduced and used as the basis to create new

work. In order to encourage the practice of

making research published in this journal

reproducible by others, authors are strongly

encouraged to: (i) to adopt, for all data analysis

and graphics, software tools which are themselves

conducive to reproducible research, as the R

(Ihaka & Gentleman, 1996) or Python (Oliphant,

2007) languages that have now become the lingua

franca for scientific computing; and (ii) to publish

all the source code used in their analysis in public

repositories as GitHub, Dryad, or figshare; these

can organized around R Markdown source

Santos-Silva et al. (2019)

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documents (Marwick et al., 2018) or Jupyter

notebooks (Kluyver et al., 2016). While

considering reproducibility to be a desirable goal,

the editors of Tropical Diversity emphasize that

the journal policy is to encourage authors to

consider this as an opportunity that they may wish

to take, rather than as a requirement that is

imposed upon them. All submissions to the

journal will continue to be reviewed using the

normal process; the issue of reproducibility will

be considered only when a paper had been

accepted for publication on the basis of its

scientific merit as judged by our peer-review

process.

Frequency

Tropical Diversity adopts a continuous

flow of publication (rolling pass) in one annual

volume with two issues per year. Articles will be

published shortly after acceptance and the final

corrections of the master proof have been made.

Publication Fees

In order to cover publication expenses –

especially those involved in journal production

and online hosting and archiving – Tropical

Diversity charges an Article Processing Charge

(APC) to authors for each article published. Such

publication fees are fixed and independent of

article page length, with no additional fees for

color figures or Supporting Information (SI).

Currently, authors are asked a fee of $100 BRL

per article.

In cases where authors do not have the

means to pay the publication fees, they can apply

for a waiver. Authors wishing to apply for a

waiver must do so at the point of submission.

Publication fees are payable upon article

acceptance. Authors’ ability to pay publication

fees will never be a consideration in the decision

whether to publish. Decisions to accept or reject

articles are made solely on the basis of merit, and

information about waiver applications are not

disclosed to the editors or reviewers.

References

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Geography 21: 6-18.

Connell, J. H. 1978. Diversity in tropical rain

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1310.

Dobzhansky, T. 1950. Evolution in the tropics.

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Gentleman, R. 2005. Reproducible research: a

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Biology 4: Issue 1, Article 2.

Goodman, S. N., Fanelli, D. & Ioannidis, J. P. A.

2016. What does research reproducibility

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Gritzner, C. F. 2007. The Tropics. New York:

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Ihaka, R. & Gentleman, R. 1996. R: A language

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