Editorial: 2009 in review

Year 2009 was a banner year for Evolutionary Applications. Along with publishing four full issues (40 papers), the journal was fully indexed in ISI Web of Science, and was awarded the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for Best New Journal for 2009. We received 84 submissions, an over 20% increase from 2008. We published two special issues: Evolutionary Medicine, 2(1); and Towards Darwinian Fisheries Management, 2(3), and had an article featured as a Must Read in the Faculty of 1000 (Colautti et al. 2009). Although Evolutionary Applications was launched in 2008, papers published in the first 2 years have already been cited 370 times in over 90 different journals for an average citation per item of 3.75. Watch for our first impact factor which will be issued sometimes during 2010.

In store for 2010

To accommodate for the increase in submissions, we will be publishing six issues in 2010. Four of these issues will contain regular articles. As you can see, 3(2) is a special issue on Biological Invasions, edited by Carol Lee, Bob Holt and Kristina Schierenbeck. Issue 3(5) will be a special issue on Evolutionary Change in Agro-Ecosystems, edited by Pete Thrall and Jim Bever.

This year we will also be finalizing our data archiving policy, which will be implemented in 2011. Along with most of the main ecology and evolution journals, we will be encouraging authors to deposit the data used to generate the main results of their papers into data repositories such as Dryad, the database developed by NSECENT and currently funded by the National Science Foundation. Authors interested in the benefits of data archiving can learn more in Whitlock et al. (2010).

Fully accessible

Evolutionary Applications will continue to freely available to all in 2010, and will have a strong presence at many of the relevant meetings and conferences worldwide. We plan to hold our yearly editorial meeting at SSE/ASN/SSB in Portland, OR (25–29 June 2010). As always, we welcome comments and suggestions from the community either by e-mail (evolappl@zoology.ubc.ca), or in person.

Submit your best papers in Evolutionary Applications!

As you can see in Table 1, Evolutionary Applications publishes papers that use principles from evolutionary biology to address topics ranging from disease biology to human-mediated selection to climate change. We are very flexible in the types of papers that we consider, provided that the application of evolutionary biology to practical questions is clear. Please contact the journal office if you are not sure whether your paper is appropriate for the journal. We particularly encourage submissions of review papers on any topic falling within the scope of the journal. Potential contributors are invited to contact Louis Bernatchez to discuss the relevance of the review prior to submission.

Table 1.

Topics covered in Evolutionary Applications in 2009

Topic	Citation
Climate change	Franks and Weis (2009)
Conservation	Dunlop et al. (2009); Griffiths et al. (2009); Rossi et al. (2009); Underwood (2009)
Crop-wild interactions	Campbell et al. (2009); Normandeau et al. (2009)
Disease biology	Crespi et al. (2009); Fairlie-Clarke et al. (2009); Heyer and Quintana-Murci (2009); Kopp and Medzhitov (2009); Pearce et al. (2009); Pepper et al. (2009); Sadd and Schmid-Hempel (2009); Varki et al. (2009)
Drug resistance	Koella et al. (2009); Pongtavornpinyo et al. (2009); Read and Huijben (2009)
Genetically modified organisms	Huang et al. (2009); Merimans et al. (2009)
Host-parasite biology & virulence	Brown et al. (2009); Joseph et al. (2009); Reece et al. (2009); Zwart et al. (2009)
Human-mediated selection	Arlinghaus et al. (2009); Conover and Baumann (2009); Cooke et al. (2009); Enberg et al. (2009); Hutchings (2009); Jørgensen et al. (2009); Kendall et al. (2009); Kuparinen et al. (2009); Nussle et al. (2009); Okamoto et al. (2009); Perez-Rodriguez et al. (2009); Redpath et al. (2009); Sharpe and Hendry (2009); Wang and Hook (2009)
Invasion biology	Colautti et al. (2009); Hodgins et al. (2009)

Finally, we wish to sincerely thank our associate editors, members of our editorial board as well as all referees that have been working hard to make 2009 a highly successful year for Evolutionary Applications.