PROCEEDINGS INFORMATION

The Western North American Naturalist (WNAN) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal publishing original research articles on the biological natural history of western North America. The journal is distributed online (http://www.bioone.org/loi/wnan) and in print, and is indexed by the Web of Science and Google Scholar. The manuscripts can be submitted at https://www.editorialmanager.com/wnan/default2.aspx after creating an account.

 Submitted papers from the 10th California Islands Symposium (CIS) will be considered for publication in a special issue of WNAN. Contributions from all disciplines will be welcome. The CIS special issue will be open access in its electronic form 24 months after publication, and may be purchased in print for $35. A PDF file of each published article will be provided to the corresponding author for distribution. Page charges will be waived for authors and be paid by the supporters of the Symposium.

 Authors must follow WNAN’s submission guidelines (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/wnan/policies.html). Preference will be given to concise manuscripts of 12,000 words or less. Papers should be in standard scientific format and typically include the following discrete sections: title, abstract, methods, results, discussion, acknowledgments, and literature cited. Experimental, descriptive, and historical data are equally acceptable, but simple species lists are discouraged.

Open Access is unfortunately not possible with the current publication platform. However, the journal's publication agreement is liberal with authors' rights to distribute their work to colleagues in electronic format via email or on nonprofit institutional online repositories without an embargo period. On the ScholarsArchive platform (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/wnan/), articles remain behind a subscription paywall for 3 years from the publication date and then become freely available after that period. In the case of the California Islands Symposium, participants will be granted free immediate access to the content after WNAN enters the email address of the participant into their system and the user creates an account on ScholarsArchive with that same email address.

WNAN does not prohibit the use of AI tools to publish, but asks that papers aided by these technologies include a statement describing how and to what extent the technology was used (e.g., idea generation, analysis, reference searching and summarization, crafting of text, etc.). ChapGPT and other services should not be listed as an author on the papers.

Preprints are allowable. WNAN requests that authors acknowledge the preprint and provide a URL in the cover letter of a submission. Authors are responsible for management of the preprint after publication of the research in the Western North American Naturalist.

All manuscripts will undergo a rigorous peer review process prior to publication. Based on manuscript reviews, decisions regarding publication are then made by the journal's editor and associate editors.

 Authors will have 4 months following the symposium to submit their manuscripts to WNAN. The due date will be February 1, 2024. This deadline is firm and there will be no extensions. The editors and reviewers will aim to make the first decisions and provide feedback to authors around March 31, 2024. Once authors receive feedback from WNAN, they will then have 6 weeks to make necessary revisions and send their revised manuscripts back to WNAN. After all accepted manuscripts are assembled, the volume will be about 8 months in production.