Editorial

With this first issue of volume 34 of Systematic Entomology, we welcome a new co-editor, Lars Vilhelmsen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, and thank and acknowledge the service given to the journal by Frank Krell over the past 6 years. Ironically, the reduction in Frank’s daily commute from 4 h a day in the U.K. to a short drive in Denver has reduced his time to commit to editing. We thank him for his diligence and maintenance of friendly relationships with the world’s Coleopteran systematists. From January 2009, Lars Vilhelmsen will handle Hymenoptera and European and Asian origin manuscripts. Peter Cranston will continue to deal with Diptera and submissions from the ‘rest of the world’. As editors of a peer-reviewed journal, we understand the ever-increasing demands on reviewers’ time and patience. To this end we have sought to implement a ‘pre-reviewing’ system to ensure that specialist reviewers’ valuable time is spent only in submissions that are deemed to lie within the remit of the journal, and are of appropriate quality and sufficiently wide interest. Our editorial board is best used for this pre-review purpose and increasingly editors call upon their opinion in this regard. With a change in co-editor, it is timely to review the composition of the board. After deliberation between all editors, and consultation with existing board members, we are pleased to announce that Michael Engel, University of Kansas; John Trueman, Australian National University; Carol von Dohlen, Utah State University; and Niklas Wahlberg, University of Turku, have agreed to add their expertise. To those who have served in the past, we express our grateful thanks for the services provided and hope that we will continue to receive their manuscripts and those of their students and laboratories. To the new board (identified on the inside front cover), we look forward to your judgements on what constitutes good entomological systematics, suitable for our journal, irrespective of how close to your particular research taxon and methods. In 2008, the trend continued towards increased pre-review advice from members of the board, a high acceptance rate amongst those forwarded to referees, shorter papers, and greater allocation of data to supplementary materials (now supporting information). The time to paper publication was also short – indeed rather too close to just-in-time inventory practice! This meant reduced use of e-availability and near equilibrium between pages allocated to the journal and the number of accepted papers. In the four issues (721 pages) in the year, we published 35 papers, of average length 20 pages, with a maximum of 44 pages. The location of first authors continues to show dominance of the U.S.A., although again we note that many U.S.-based authors are doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from elsewhere, who receive their graduate and post-doctoral systematics training in the U.S.A. and some of whom return to permanent positions at home, or to new countries. Our first authors were located in the U.S.A. (12), France (four), Australia (two), Argentina (two), Canada (two), Spain (two), Sweden (two) and Japan (two) and one from each of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Co-authors’ nationalities included many of the above, plus the Czech Republic, Mexico, Switzerland and, with regret, only a solitary British-based co-author. We published six book and software reviews, an editorial, and a solicited opinion piece that aroused some heated correspondence, but no formal responses were forthcoming. Nevertheless, we encourage further submission of opinions of contentious issues in insect systematics. The journal produced two ‘virtual’ issues associated with topics of symposia from the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America held at Reno, Nevada, in November 2008. The idea is to bring together thematic papers published in the journal in past years, linked with an editorial, or in future by a commissioned ‘Opinion’ article. The first collection concerning ‘Larval Information in Entomological Systematics’ was associated with a symposium organised by Caroline Chaboo and Yves Alarie, and the second, on ‘Systematic and Diversity of Coleoptera’, with one organised by Fran Keller. Free access is provided to all included papers from a single site: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/sen_larvae_vi.pdf and http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/sen_coleoptera_vi.pdf respectively. We believe that this initiative will encourage student access to a range of papers of significance in our discipline, and we encourage others to suggest future thematic topics.

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