At that time, libraries were engaged in active triage to cut their expenditures and turnaround times were getting longer as journals accumulated accepted papers and deliberated over the tradeoffs between adding issues and pressure to keep subscription costs low. In 1993, on-line journals were either solely text or required the reader to possess an advanced computer degree to decipher the articles. Email, ftp, and gopher were the dominant interfaces to the internet, and the World Wide Web was just starting to emerge. We've now published 3 issues of Conservation Ecology using the software. At present articles must be submitted by email.
All journals have formatting guidelines.
Unlike other journals where formatting focuses on the journal's visual style, and language and citation preferences, formatting for Conservation Ecology is geared to preparing the manuscript for automated handling by our software. Relatively few changes from the familiar formats of print journals were required in the end to satisfy the Conservation Ecology system requirements. Each text, figure, table, or appendix must be submitted as a separate file. This is similar to print journals that require that these be each submitted on a separate page at the end of the article. We provide a text template for authors to copy into their word processing package and use.