EJT volume 500 now online!

On September 9th, 2011, the European Journal of Taxonomy published its first paper. Now, 7 years and 5 months later, volume 500 is published online. In these 89 months, EJT has published 1791 new taxa (1602 new species) in 17,400 pages (which is almost 200 pages per month). EJT is fully funded by a consortium of nine Natural History Institutes (from six European countries) and is thus still diamond open access (neither authors nor readers have to pay). EJT is also published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that all items published in EJT can be freely reproduced, provided the source is mentioned. EJT can thus safely be called a pioneer journal in open access publication in descriptive taxonomy. Since a few years, EJT is also a CETAF-endorsed journal.

All EJT papers are produced fully inhouse by a group of desk editors, each working in their individual institutes. The production capacity of EJT is thus limited to what our desk editors can handle. Therefore, the more the EJT-consortium grows, the higher will be EJT output, without, however, compromising the high scientific and technical standards that are now applied. We thus encourage other Natural History Institutes to apply for membership of the EJT consortium. The above numbers of published pages and new taxa speak for themselves: new members will become part of a successful initiative!

The paper we have selected to be published in EJT no. 500 today is a monograph describing a new genus and three new species of mangrove slugs (intertidal, airbreathing molluscs), from the Indo-West Pacific. The lead author, Benoit Dayrat, decided earlier on in his career to revise the entire family Onchidiidae which was in a terrible state of taxonomic confusion. This in itself is not unusual (and sadly very recognisable for many fellow taxonomists), but the way the Dayrat lab decided to work is, without exaggeration, exemplary. They decided to tackle the group, genus by genus, in a systematic order, and to use integrative taxonomy, thus profiting from both morphological and molecular data. Their series of six published papers, now seven, shows that they also have eye for the ecology and biogeography of their animals. EJT is proud to publish this revision!