Overview

All articles and opinion pieces to be considered for publication in the Journal of Forest Business Research (JFBR) are to be submitted online. JFBR uses Open Journal Systems (OJS) software to manage the submission and review processes. Articles must be written in English. Major forms of standard written English (e.g., U.S., British, Australian) may be used, as long as a consistent style is used throughout the manuscript. Authors must keep in mind that submitted articles must be previously unpublished material, with the exception that material appearing in the preprints to a conference, etc., can be republished, with the permission of the copyright owner, and there must be an Acknowledgments section stating the first appearance of the material, as well as describing the permissions under which the material is being published again.

General policies of JFBR

The general policies of JFBR, as drawn from Bioresources, are as follows:

• Submitted articles must focus on the science, new technologies and the business aspects of sustainable and responsible forest investments and management.
• Articles must include a section(s) on practical implications of manuscript’s results/key messages for forest business.
• Articles to be included in the journal must describe significant advances or significantly improved explanations and overviews (as in the case of review articles) of subjects within the scope of the journal. In addition to originality, the work must be understandable to a general audience of post-secondary-educated readers with backgrounds in areas such as business administration, finance, economics, or forest management. However, we encourage all authors to provide fundamental explanations of non-basic concepts to respect the diverse backgrounds of readers who may not be conversant in the field.
• English will be used as the standard language of articles in JFBR. Prospective authors are urged to consistently adhere to a standard form of English, following U.S., British, or Australian English conventions.
• All scientific measurements should also conform to SI standards, e.g., meters, kilograms, and liters. Imperial, US customary and other units should be converted to SI units whenever possible or the conversions to SI should be provided. There will be no set standard method of describing measurement suffixes outside of the SI frame, e.g., volume may be expressed in liters (L), milliliters (mL), deciliters (dL), cubic centimeters (cm³), etc. Journal allows conversions to customary units in parenthesis, if relevant. For instance, the land parcel is 202.3 hectares (500 acres).
• Authors are asked, as far as they are able, to make clear differentiations in their writing between (a) facts learned from sources that they identify (followed by a citation), (b) facts that are presumed to be common knowledge (usually expressed in the present tense and requiring no citation), (c) observations made by the authors as part of the described work (usually expressed in the past tense), and (d) hypotheses and conjecture (often preceded by words such as “it is proposed that” or “possibly”).
• Submission of articles advancing unconventional hypotheses or frameworks of thought is expressly welcome, although this is not a guarantee of acceptance for publication. The fact that experimental evidence or theoretical work remains incomplete, inconclusive, or conflicted will not necessarily prevent the publication of a submitted article. On the other hand, it is required in such cases that there be significant new evidence or new thinking that helps to support the unconventional views advanced in the article. Articles submitted as rebuttals will be treated independently by the editors.
• Commercialism will not be permitted in items submitted to JFBR. For instance, companies’ or product’s names are to appear only once in an article. Work that merely shows one product working better than another product will not be considered for publication.
• Authors retain rights to their material, which, upon acceptance by the journal, is uploaded and made public on the Internet. The journal retains no copyright. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles in the journal, and users can use, reuse, and build upon the material in the journal for non-commercial purposes as long as attribution is given when appropriate or necessary.
• By submitting an article to JFBR, the author grants the journal the right to publish the contents as a PDF file on the Internet, depending on the results of the review process and subsequent judgment of editors. The right to publish the article is an exclusive right held by JFBR until the article is either rejected or published and the article cannot be submitted to another journal during our review process. In cases where the journal declines to publish and so informs the author(s), this right of publication is ceded back to the author(s).
• The peer-review process for research articles, scholarly reviews and Forest Business Notes is carried out in an automated fashion. Each article is sent to be judged by reviewers working independently, without knowledge of each others’ identities. The reviewers are selected by the Editors or by their designees.
• The editors reserve the right to make a final judgement on whether or not to approve an article for inclusion in JFBR. This decision will be made based on their judgements relative to the weight of input from the reviewers, the degree to which the article falls within the focus of the Journal, the degree to which the article is expected to interest substantial numbers of readers, the uniqueness of the work, the overall quality of the work, the effectiveness of the writing in engaging the interest of potential readers, and other factors listed elsewhere on this site.
• Authors are responsible for making sure that the contents of submitted articles have not previously been published. Academic theses, published lectures, abstracts or research-in-progress conference proceedings which can be published or placed on the web, will not be counted as publications.
• Authors must disclose in their Acknowledgements section any previous publication of contents of their work in conference preprints, etc., and also state whether the copyright owner has granted them permission to republish the material.
• Authors have the responsibility to not copy the work of others. This responsibility extends to having made a good-faith effort to cite important previous work that the authors have used in the process of carrying out your work and in describing the results of that work. Evidence of verbatim copying (except for short quotes with proper attribution and quotation marks), or paraphrasing the work of others without proper attribution or explicit permission for use, will be sufficient grounds for rejection of an article.
• At first, JFBR will be organized as an annual journal, using volume number, i.e., there will be one issue in 2022. Articles will be accepted and published periodically throughout each year and numbered sequentially in order of publication.
• JFBR will use an author-date citation format, such as the Council of Science Editors. This system cites references with an author and date in the text such as (Chudy et al. 2022) and lists the full references alphabetically at the end of the text in the paper. One citation summary is contained at The Ohio State University 2022.

Article preparation

Please be aware that submitted files larger than 2 MB will be rejected by the automated submission system (Open Journal Systems, or OJS). If the editable file for your submitted article is larger than this, please e-mail it directly to the editors. However, please ALSO complete the online submission process, even if you skip the step of uploading a document file. You will know that you are done after you have entered “Finish Submission.” At that point in the process, you will have an opportunity to select “Active files” and make note of the ID number (which will be referred to as “JFBR #####”, replacing the #’s with digits) of your submitted article. We prefer that you always include the label “JFBR #####” (with your article’s ID number replacing “#####”) in the subject line of your e-mail.

Writing style suggestions

Although JFBR welcomes a variety of writing styles, including various regional differences in spelling, we use a set of style preferences to ensure uniformity in the journal. We encourage authors to employ the following guidelines:

1. Favor the use of present tense in the “Introduction” and in discussions that describe the state of the art of scientific knowledge in a given field.
2. Generally use past tense when describing experimental methods and results. The reason for this is that we want the reader to be able to know very clearly what parts of the article represent work by the authors.
3. New authors frequently pay inadequate attention to discussing their results. In particular, it is usually a good idea to compare and contrast your new results relative to past theoretical and empirical work by others. Depending on author preference, authors submitting to JFBR may either combine “Results and Discussion” or use separate “Results” and “Discussion” sections. In either case, the greatest value of scientific publications involves efforts to analyze, interpret, or prove your results relative to one or more hypotheses.
4. When writing your Materials and Methods section, the main criterion to follow is that other researchers in the future should be able to repeat your work. It is perfectly satisfactory to just cite published procedures that you followed. However, you will need to carefully explain any procedures that were unique to your own study. In some cases, it may make sense to be more comprehensive in this section, depending on the novelty of the work or other considerations. The manufacturer name and location should be provided for all specialized equipment, and software mentioned in this section. All standards and methods used should be cited.
5. When writing the Introduction, new authors should focus on providing sufficient context, based on the literature, so that readers somewhat unfamiliar with the field will be able to judge the relative importance of their new findings. Key articles, upon which the current work depends, should be emphasized. In a research article (as opposed to a review article), it is not necessary to include extensive explanations of concepts or facts that already are explained in other publications.
6. Authors are encouraged to write their abstracts after they have completed the rest of the writing. A good starting strategy is to use one or two sentences, at most, to summarize the main thrust of each of the major sections of the article, e.g., Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and Practical Implications, and Conclusions, with a preferred Abstract maximum of 250 words.
7. Knowing that the title of your article will be the part that is read by the greatest number of people, it is a good idea to go back and scrutinize it again, after the rest of your writing it mostly done. Can the words be misinterpreted? Is the title readily understood by your intended audience? Does it capture people’s attention? Does it adequately describe your topic? Authors are discouraged from using words such as “new” and “novel” in the title.
8. Choose key words that adequately and succinctly represent the crux of your research article. Do they fairly cover the overall concepts, strategies, and methods used in the work? These words are very important, as they are among various pointers that are used to direct attention to your article.
9. Finally, choose your figures and tables carefully to make the most impact to our readers. Can you put in a graph or plot what you would have put in a table (or vice versa) that facilitates comprehension of the research? Are the figures easily read, or do our readers need a magnifying glass to see the data?
10. Authors are requested to use a consistent system of journal name abbreviations in the References Cited section. It is acceptable to use full journal names if this is done throughout the list. If it is decided to use abbreviations of journal names (which is preferred by many authors), please use the following browser for guidance. For journals not on the list, please use an abbreviated form that is consistent with the above browser or follow with how other researchers have abbreviated those journals. As noted, follow a Council of Science Editors (CSE) author-date citation reference format in the text, and an alphabetical list of references at the end of the article.

Image preparation

Figures should be embedded in the manuscript and numbered in the order in which they appear. All figure parts should be labelled (a), (b), etc.

Authors can ease the burden on the process of editing and reviewing by avoiding the use of excessively high-resolution graphics. When incorporating images into an article to be submitted to JFBR, it is recommended that the image files be modified, as necessary, so that no one of them has a file size larger than about 250 kB. Most image processing software provides ways to decrease file size, often by reducing the nominal size of a JPEG image, etc. Because of the default settings that are used during the creation of PDF files, the resolution of the published version usually is not affected by moderate reductions in the resolution of the original image files that are inserted into a document.

Authors are encouraged to use color graphics. There is no additional cost for color, as long as the figures meet the maximum size recommendation.

Submission instructions

JFBR is one of many journals that use an automated software system known as Open Journal Systems (OJS). This system makes organizing our workflow much easier, but it is necessary to follow certain procedures. Please be aware that the appearance of some of the screens will change, depending on whether or not you have logged on, registered, etc.

Sending a revised article after peer review

When preparing to send a revised version, please start the process by making a copy of the review reports (which will have been e-mailed to you by the editor), and insert your brief comments indicating how the authors decided to address each issue that was raised. Then, please use the “Review Version” of your article (which should have been returned to you) as the starting point for preparing the revised document. We would be grateful if you would use highlighting or colored text to indicate items that are new or modified. Then, please use send your revised article and accompanying responses to reviewers in your OJS-JFBR account.

Retraction and correction policy

The Journal of Forest Business Research has a professional obligation to ensure the integrity of the written scientific record. After the publication of an article, changes will only be allowed in the limited circumstances discussed below.

Corrections: A statement by the authors that describes errors in the article that are due to omission or inadvertent mistakes will be published as a Correction statement, which will appear on the final page of the article. The Correction statement should make clear any effect the corrected material has on the conclusions reached in the original article.

Retractions: In some cases, a Retraction will be published, indicating that the results of the original article are not reliable and that readers should not consider the article to be part of the scientific record. A Retraction may be issued as a result of clear scientific misconduct, including, but not limited to, plagiarism, fabrication of data, falsification of data, or unethical research.

In all cases, the notice of Retraction will describe the reason for the retraction and the responsible parties. If the retraction has been made without the agreement of all authors, this will also be made known.