LAUSR

After a very hard year, dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we feel that it is time to address our readership with this new editorial. There are not only bad news but there is important information to share, some of which concerns the entire mycological community and/or the authors, reviewers and editors of this journal in particular. Despite the pandemic, 106 articles have been published in the journal Mycological Progress in 2020, which is the first time ever that the number of publications went over 100 in one year. In addition, in 2020, we have received over 300 new submissions. Herewith, I would like to acknowledge the confidence of the authors and the hard work of all colleagues in the editorial board, as well as numerous reviewers, who gave good advice and helped to improve the manuscripts. We have defined new criteria for acceptance of manuscripts last year and changed the Instructions to Authors accordingly (see: https ://www.sprin ger.com/journ al/11557 / submi ssion -guide lines ). For instance, we do no longer consider short communications or papers that deal with single species descriptions unless certain quality criteria can be met. This has been necessary to improve the workflow and reduce the workload for the editorial team, which we have expanded at the same time. Owing to these new criteria, the processing time from submission of the suitable manuscripts to final acceptance has now further decreased, and we think that this has also led to a further improvement of the quality of our papers. In addition, the time from submission of the first version of the papers or the revised versions, respectively, to the decision has been minimized further. The major bottlenecks are now clearly (i) the review process and (ii) the copy editing process. While we will still need to rely on the willingness of reviewers to perform their work on time, we are actively aiming to improve the following process further. For instance, we hope that the publisher will soon allow us to use a manuscript template that can be used by the authors to set up their papers by themselves. We have also taken measures to have all new articles in Mycological Progress included in PubMed (MEDLINE) and hope this will be implemented very soon. At the same time, we would like to point out some recent community papers that were published primarily on initiative of the ICTF board (https ://www.funga ltaxo nomy.org/) that resulted in various recommendations in order to standardize publications of fungal names. In general, authors are encouraged to follow these recommendations. We also would like to encourage the editors and reviewers of Mycological Progress to take them into account. The paper by Lücking et al. (2020) covers the state of the art in fungal barcoding and clearly points out the limits of ITS sequence data, which remain to be valuable as the primary barcode, for taxonomic purposes. On the other hand, the authors made strong recommendations to use secondary barcodes and multi-gene genealogies for actual taxonomic rearrangements and pointed out that phenotype-based characteristics will not become expedient for a concise identification anytime soon. Our journal is presently dominated by taxonomic work, and we assume that this will remain so in the near future. However, we would like to encourage authors who want to submit papers to Mycological Progress to keep these recommendations in mind. Even in case of studies that have no primary taxonomic background, it will be crucial to provide as much information on the taxonomy of the fungi that were studied. For instance, we strongly discourage the “identification” of a fungus that is supposed to be of value for biotechnological applications or to play an important ecological role, by generating an ITS sequence and using the BLAST tool of NCBI (https ://blast .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast .cgi). The * Marc Stadler [email protected]