Guidelines for Editors

The Editor’s Core Role

As a member of the Fungal Taxa: Systematics & Evolution editorial team, your primary responsibility is to safeguard the scientific quality and integrity of the content we publish. Editors act as guardians of the taxonomic and evolutionary record, ensuring that all contributions meet the highest standards of accuracy, transparency, and ethical conduct. This role includes managing the peer review process with fairness, making objective decisions, and upholding the journal’s mission of advancing fungal taxonomy and systematics worldwide.

Manuscript Handling and Peer Review

● Fairness and Objectivity: All manuscripts must be assessed impartially, judged solely on their scientific merit, originality, and relevance to the journal’s scope—without consideration of the author’s nationality, institution, gender, religion, or background.
● Managing the Review Process: Editors are responsible for ensuring a timely, rigorous, and constructive review process. This includes selecting qualified, independent reviewers; providing them with clear guidelines; and ensuring their feedback is professional and relevant.
● Confidentiality: Manuscripts under review, along with all associated materials, must be treated as confidential. Information may not be disclosed outside the editorial and peer-review process.

Editorial Decisions

● Basis for Decisions: Acceptance or rejection must rest on scientific importance, methodological soundness, clarity, and contribution to fungal systematics and evolution.
● Independence: Editorial judgments must remain free of commercial or institutional influence. Decisions should never be swayed by personal relationships, political pressures, or the origin of the submission.

Upholding Publication Ethics

● Adherence to COPE: Editors must follow the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and apply its best practice guidelines in editorial work.
● Conflicts of Interest: Editors must declare and manage their own conflicts of interest, recusing themselves from handling manuscripts where impartiality may be compromised. They are also responsible for ensuring that conflicts of interest are transparently managed for authors and reviewers.
● Investigating Misconduct: Editors must act on suspicions of misconduct—including plagiarism, data fabrication, falsification, duplicate submission, or authorship disputes.
● COPE Flowcharts: Allegations of misconduct must be addressed using COPE’s recommended flowcharts to ensure investigations are systematic, fair, and defensible.

Correcting the Scholarly Record

Editors share responsibility for the accuracy and reliability of the published literature. If significant errors or ethical breaches are identified, editors must take prompt action by issuing a correction (corrigendum), expression of concern, or retraction, as appropriate.

Contributing to Journal Development

Editors are encouraged to contribute actively to the growth and visibility of Fungal Taxa: Systematics & Evolution. This includes:

- Participating in editorial board discussions and decision-making.
- Advising on journal policies and best practices.
- Encouraging high-quality submissions from the global community of fungal systematists.

- Supporting the journal’s reputation as a trusted and authoritative platform in taxonomy and evolutionary biology.