Freshwater Crayfish

At the recent International Association of Astacology (IAA) meeting, there was a fair amount of discussion about one of the society’s publications, Freshwater Crayfish. Having examined a hardcopy at the meeting, I can say that they did a very nice job with the production of the last issue (pictured).

Since this is one forum that is a perfectly logical place to publish Marmorkrebs research, I’ll convey a few things I learned at the meeting.

First, Freshwater Crayfish is a journal. Because of its length time between issues, people often think that papers in it are proceedings from the IAA meeting. Nope – journal. It has an ISSN number and everything.

Second, you do not have to attend an IAA symposium, or be an IAA member to publish in Freshwater Crayfish. It is open to all. That said, the IAA could do more to facilitate outside submissions. For instance, the link to author’s instructions on the IAA website currently brings up a 2 page PDF document... that is completely blank. The author’s instructions were printed in the IAA conference booklet, so I’ll see what I can do about getting them online.

Currently, Freshwater Crayfish is indexed in Scopus, but not Thompson ISI Web of Science. There was some discussion about the future of the journal, which included a shorter time between publication, which would help it get into Web of Science. Still, “shorter delay” may be moving from every other year to every year.