About the Journal

Overview

Lundiana is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes articles about all aspects of biodiversity in a continuous publication model (rather publishing conventional complete issues). Lundiana welcomes articles dealing with taxonomy, especially the description of new taxa, conservation biology, ecology, phylogeny, phylogeography and studies on natural or introduced species genetic diversity, scientific education and outreach, and history of science on biodiversity. Lundiana also seeks to be a venue for opinions of academic and society at large on issues related to biodiversity

Our history

Lundiana has been published for the first time in December, 1980 sponsored by the Department of Zoology at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). It is named after the danish naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund, who was the first naturalist to make of what is now Minas Gerais State his home, to honor his extensive work and multiple contribution to the knowledge of extant and past biodiversity at his hundredth death anniversary. The name also refers to the short-story by Guimarães Rosa “Recado do Morro”, wherein the word “Lundiana” debuts. Rosa is the poet of Minas Gerais hinterlands and its people, and means with Lundiana (or “Lundlândia”) the knowledge gained from local landscape by science and western culture, regretfully out of grasp by whom lives there. We hope to contribute to overcoming this by sharing this "Lundiana" with the people, while their traditional ways of life and knowledge are respected and a better balance is reached in the economic exploitation of these lands.

In 2002, it was assumed by the UFMG Taxonomic Collections Committee, succeeded by the Taxonomic Collections Center (CCT-UFMG), being published until 2016. Currently, CCT-UFMG comprises 25 collections and houses samples since beginning of Twentieth century, including areas severely degraded by human activities as, for example, the Rio Doce basin devastated by the rupture of a mining company dam.

Throughout its existence, Lundiana has given venue to the description of new species, data on distribution, ecology and behavior of neotropical taxa and reviews on technical aspects of the study of biodiversity and its conservation. The increasing difficulties in maintain a publication on paper, have led to its lack of periodicity over the last years and its virtual abandonment.

However, the same urge for an journal fit to the publication of new research on biodiversity in general and neotropical in particular felt in 1980 stands today. The establishment of a Journal Gateway by UFMG, the adoption of a system that automates most of the magazine editing process (the OJS - Open Journal System) and the acceptance of descriptions published exclusively in digital media, effective since September 2012, makes the resumption of Lundiana viable, now as a fast continuous publishing journal exclusively online.

Our philosophy

We are authors providing a non-profit journal to serve our peers and not to slave them. The values of article processing fees of many journals dishearten authors on biodiversity to publish in Open Access Journals. On other hand, universities and research centers often spend much of their budget in journals subscriptions and authors see their own work behind paywalls. The UFMG Journal Gateway allowed us offer an Open Access Journal at costs of a timely peer review and proofing only.

We seek for peer-review practices that guarantee accurately described procedures and factually correct results at same time allow authors express their evidence based views. We also hope encourage the public debate on biodiversity in our opinion section.

Open Access and Copyright

All articles published by Lundiana are immediately available to read, download and share. They are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License terms that allows using and distributing in any medium, given that the original work is properly cited and not used for profit. The copyright of any article published by Lundiana is kept by the authors that grant us just a license to publish it.

Scope

Lundiana consider original submissions dealing with all matters related to biodiversity, corresponding to the knowledge domains of systematics, biogeography, population biology, evolution, functional (trait-based) ecology, abiotic tolerances, and ecological interactions, aim at contributing in surmounting the main shortfalls in biodiversity knowledge (Hortal et al., 2015).

Concerning taxonomy, we welcome species descriptions as well re-descriptions, addition of unknown sexes and ontogenetic data, and new occurrences given it leads to considerable range extension. We are specially interested in making available the knowledge stored in natural history collections and the gray literature.

As a journal sponsored by curators of taxonomical collections, we aim at shortening the long shelf life of specimens in natural history collections that preceded description (average of 21 years according to Fontaine et al. (2012)).

Cited references

Fontaine, B., Perrard, A. & Bouchet, P. (2012). 21 years of shelf life between discovery and description of new species. Current Biology, 22, R943–R944

Hortal, J.F., Bello, F., Diniz-Filho, J. A. F., Lewinsohn,T. M., Lobo, J. M., & Ladle, R. J. (2015). Seven shortfalls that beset large-scale knowledge of bio-diversity. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics,46(1), 523–549.