(Uploaded on behalf of Dr. Adam M. Goldstein)

Welcome to the new blog! Springer has changed its blogging platform. It’s never too late for a fresh start. More than the blog is changing, and now is a good time to talk about some of the other changes at EE&O. To be clear, our goals remain the same: publish articles for a general audience explaining the state of the art in evolutionary science, science education, and the connections between evolutionary science and the world of ideas, art, current events, and opinion. We hope that teachers at all levels find EE&O useful. There are many excellent resources for learning the basics about evolutionary science, and many that focus on the mistakes and distortions of ideas about evolution advanced by creationists and their purportedly scientific inheritors. What makes EE&O different is that we publish in-depth articles that start with the science. In our first 5 volumes, many issues were “special topics” issues. Each concentrates on a particular phenomenon or idea. Volumes 1–5, taken as a group, amount to a sophisticated encyclopedia of evolutionary biology.

So, what are the changes?

1. New web site address: http://www.evolution-outreach.com. This is where new papers will appear and where authors should go to submit new ones.
2. EE&O is now an open-access journal. All new papers will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). This is one of the more permissive licenses available. Anyone can take a work released under this license and distribute it to others, modify the work, and use the work for commercial purposes—all so long as the work is attributed to its authors. Copies of works redistributed under the license must have a copy of the license with them. Open access journals don’t make money by selling journal subscriptions. Rather, at the time a paper is accepted, the publisher charges a fee, usually paid by an author’s institution or by grant funds supporting the author’s work. Since EE&O is intended to publish works of teachers and others not supported by a grant big enough to cover publishing fees, there are generous provisions for waiving or reducing the publication fee.
3. Volumes 1–6, 2008–2013, can be found at the old link http://link.springer.com/journal/12052. These are available free of charge, but they are not open-access. This means that, in general, permission is required to reproduce and distribute them.
4. No print edition. As hard as it is to write this, it’s true.
5. No issues. Part of the reason there will not be any more print copies is that there will not be any more issues: articles will not be collected into discrete units published together. Articles are identified by volume number and doi (“digital object identifier”). There will be one volume for each year, with a date of December. Articles are published online as soon as they become available, numbered in the order in which they appear.
6. No special issues. Many of the issues in earlier volumes were special issues, that is, guest-edited by an expert in his or her field, containing only articles on that field. For instance, Volume 1, issue 4 (October 2008) is a special issue on the evolution of eyes. Since there are no issues, there cannot be special issues, of course! Fortunately, articles can be linked to create a “special topical collection.” For an example of what this looks like, check out Nanoscale Research Letters at http://www.nanoscalereslett.com/series/, which uses the special topical collection to create a conference proceedings “special issue.”

(Many thanks to Ann Avouris, who explained the complexities of the move from print to digital. Ann’s official title at Springer is Senior Editor for Biomedicine, but unofficially, she is EE&O‘s guardian angel.)