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About

Aims and scope

Annals of Forest Science is an international research journal devoted to multidisciplinary research for forests and wood in a changing world. It is one of the journals of the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), a public non-profit research institution.

The scope of Annals of Forest Science covers the following research areas:

  • Biology of trees and associated organisms
  • Forest dynamics and ecosystem processes under environmental or management drivers (ecology, genetics)
  • Risks and disturbances affecting forest ecosystems (biology, ecology, economics)
  • Forests as drivers of a sustainable, circular and inclusive bioeconomy (tree breeding, forest management and productivity, ecosystem services, silviculture)
  • Wood sciences (relationships between wood structure and tree functioning, and between forest management or environment and wood properties)

The Editorial Board encourages:
  • New ideas or methods for measuring or monitoring any property of interest for tree biology, forest ecosystem dynamics, wood
  • Model-based papers focused on the forestry wood chain, including carbon accounting investigations, ecosystem services, quantification of the relationships between forest management and the properties of end products
  • Studies addressing economic and social issues of forest management under climate change and forest based bioeconomy
  • Review articles on timely topics in the scope of the journal
  • Data papers presenting databases made available to a wider community
  • Opinion papers presenting arguments about open research questions

The Editorial Board does not encourage:
  • Local case studies based on single stand experiments or small samples under local conditions, unless the addressed questions are innovative and timely
  • Purely technological papers presenting applications without a broader scientific perspective
  • Wood science papers that address purely technological questions unless the topic is very innovative or in relation to tree biology, forest ecology, or forest management

Article Types

Annals of Forest Science publishes:

  1. Research papers, describing results of original research based on an explicit research question or set of hypotheses; 
  2. Review papers, with an exhaustive analysis of the current knowledge available for a given topic;
  3. Data papers, describing a data set made available for reuse of available data by other researchers; 
  4. Opinion papers, developing a documented and informed opinion on an important question;
  5. Commentaries, solicited by the editorial board about important papers;
  6. Editorial material, usually provided by editors and aimed at documenting particular features of the journal.

For further details please read the Submissions Guidelines . You will find on the section Preparing your manuscript a template for each article type which is recommended to use to prepare a manuscript.

Topical Collections

Information available here.

Open Data

Annals of Forest Science conforms to the Open Data policy of BMC-Springer (link) and promotes data sharing based on the FAIR principles (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/). Materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data and the codes used for analysis, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes. All datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) whenever possible. The selection of the repository is the authors’ responsibility. Datasets should be cited in the reference list as appropriate.

Annals of Forest Science does not accept supplementary material; such information should be either into an annex to the main text, of be deposited together with data codes, etc… , in an Open Repository with a DOI.

Open access

All articles published by Annals of Forest Science are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in Annals of Forest Science you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article processing charges (APC)

Authors who publish open access in Annals of Forest Science are required to pay an article processing charge (APC). The APC price will be determined from the date on which the article is accepted for publication.

The current APC, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable, is: £1590.00/$2290.00/€1810.00

Visit our open access support portal and our Journal Pricing FAQs for further information.

Open access funding

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries (see our APC waivers and discounts policy for further information). Requests for APC waivers and discounts from other authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need (see our open access policies for journals for more information). All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.

Indexing Services

All articles published in Annals of Forest Science are included in:

  • AGRICOLA 
  • BIOSIS 
  • Biological Abstracts 
  • CAB Abstracts 
  • CNKI 
  • Current Contents/ Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences 
  • Dimensions 
  • EBSCO Discovery Service 
  • EBSCO Environment 
  • EMBiology 
  • Elsevier Biobase 
  • Geobase 
  • Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China 
  • Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) 
  • Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition 
  • Meta 
  • Naver 
  • OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service 
  • ProQuest Agricultural & Environmental Science Database 
  • ProQuest Central ProQuest Earth, Atmospheric & Aquatic Science Database 
  • ProQuest Environmental Science 
  • ProQuest Natural Science Collection 
  • ProQuest SciTech Premium Collection 
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Primo 
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Summon 
  • SCImago 
  • SCOPUS 
  • Science Citation Index 
  • Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch) 
  • TD Net Discovery Service 
  • UGC-CARE List (India) 
  • WTI Frankfurt eG 
  • Zoological Record

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BMC on SpringerLink.

Annals of Forest Science has an Impact Factor of 3.0 (2022) .

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

Annals of Forest Science operates a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and    the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous.

The benefit of double-blind peer review is that it allows reviewers to judge the manuscript based on content alone, and they are not unconsciously biased by knowledge of who the authors are.


Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Annals of Forest Science should adhere to BMC's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Citing articles in Annals of Forest Science

Articles in Annals of Forest Science should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Journal Abbreviation [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Diagn Pathol 2009, 1:115.

1:115 refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Historical background

The roots of the journal date back to 1923 with Annales de l’École Nationale des Eaux et Forêts and to 1964 with the launch of the journal Annales des Sciences Forestières. Since 1999, Annals of Forest Science is fully published in English (Aussenac 2002; Ann. For. Sci. DOI:10.1051/forest:2002066).

The whole archive of the journal is now available in the repository for scientific publication HAL (“Hyper Articles en Ligne”) with two specific portals: Annales des Sciences Forestières (1964-1998) and Annals of Forest Science (1999- to date).
Archives of the Annales de l’École Nationale des Eaux et Forêts (1923-1963) are available here.  

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Annals of Forest Science's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. 

Speed of publication

Annals of Forest Science offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Annals of Forest Science gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Annals of Forest Science are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Annals of Forest Science’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Annals of Forest Science may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Annals of Forest Science. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Annals of Forest Science you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.

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