Checklist: an #OA journal that fills a much-needed empty niche

I just wanted to give a shout out to a great open-access journal that fills a much needed empty niche for field biologists –  lists of biological inventories and notes on the geographic distribution of any taxon. The journal’s name is  Checklist: Journal of Species Lists and Distributions.

My collaborators and I were tired of writing variations of the following sentence in the methods section of our papers: “the reserve where we work has a full complement of regional mastofauna, but low diversity and density of small mammals (unpubl. data)". When we discovered CheckList we took our survey data and trapping data,  did some analyses, submitted it, and now have a paper we can cite instead. The reviews were speedy and helpful, including suggestions for alternative analyses and presentations of the data. Submission was a snap and the pdfs of the paper look really sharp - see for yourself.

E. M. Bruna, J. F. Guimarães, C. T. Lopes, R. Pacheco, K. G. Facure, and H. L. Vasconcelos**.** 2010_._ [Mammalia, Estação Ecologica do Panga, a Cerrado protected area in Minas Gerais state, Brazil](E.%20M. Bruna, J. F. Guimarães, C. T. Lopes, R. Pacheco, K. G. Facure, and H. L. Vasconcelos. 2010. Mammalia, Estação Ecologica do Panga, a Cerrado protected area in Minas Gerais state, Brazil. CheckList 6(4):668-675 ). CheckList 6(4):668-675.

This journal would be a great outlet for students that generate a species list as part of their work and need practice writing and revising a paper, biological reserves and the researchers who work there, or even for faculty who want to include data collection and the writing of their paper in their ecology field courses.  I also think it could play an important role for researchers in biogeography and macroecology by getting species distribution data peer-reviewed and indexed, rather than relying on unpublished data.