Annals of Forest Science moves to SNAPP, the new manuscript management system developed by Springer

From January 28, 2025 on, all new manuscripts are submitted via the Springer Nature Article Processing Platform (SNAPP), instead of the former Editorial Manager platform.

Manuscripts submitted before January 28 will still be handled via Editorial Manager. The switch to SNAPP will be finalised once these last manuscripts have been published in a few months.

You will experience a completely new user-interface that is much more user-friendly than the earlier one, and offers new services to authors, reviewers and editors. SNAPP is being progressively adopted by all Springer journals. The settings for AFS have however some specificities:

• the review process at Annals of Forest Science remains a double-blind process and na separate “title page” is no-longer required. The corresponding information will be in the metadata of the manuscript but it will not be communicated to the reviewers;
• data and codes related to the manuscript should still be deposited into an open and “FAIR” repository, to align with our open science goals and to promote reproducibility and transparency.

For more information on SNAPP: https://www.springernature.com/gp/snapp

The new submission link :  https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/13595/3

What’s new for authors and reviewers?

• As authors, you can now choose between different paper formats. The three main formats are still “Research paper”, “Review paper”, “Data paper” (called now “Database”). To help you format a manuscript according to these formats, we provide suitable templates on our website.
• Some formats that were specific to Annals of Forest Science changed: “Opinion papers” are now detailed in three different formats: “Debates”, “Matters arising” and “Perspectives”. “First reports” are now “Case Reports” with exactly the same features. We are currently developing new templates for these formats. “Editorial”, which is mainly used by the journal’s editors is still the same. The definition of these formats is now much more standardised across Springer journals. Should you have any doubt or question, please refer to the descriptions provided in SNAPP and/or send us a message at annforsci@inrae.fr .
• You may now provide “Comments” to published papers underlying the importance of the results found in published papers and providing some comments about their contribution to the development of new research ideas and/or applications.
• A fully new format, “Registered Reports”, is already listed, but is not available for AFS authors for the moment. This new format corresponds to a specific publication process disconnecting hypothesis and study design validation, data collection and results analysis and discussion (see https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports for more details). This procedure is expected to avoid some of the common replication issues and to encourage publication of “negative” (i.e., non-conclusive results) which is a major issue in many disciplines. This format should be available in a few months, once the editorial workflow of AFS has adapted to it.

We are gradually adjusting the guidelines for publication and the templates for paper preparation to take all these changes into account. They should be ready soon.

As Editors of “Annals of Forest Science”, we will have to get familiar with this new environment. This will require some time and practical experience. However, we are confident that the guidance provided to the editors and the reviewers by SNAPP will help us overcome these difficulties.

The editorial board of Annals of Forest Science is looking forward to this new step in facilitating the experience of authors, reviewers and editors with a tool designed to adapt to the evolutions of scientific publishing

The co-chief editors of Annals of Forest Science and Annals of Forest Science Team.