About the Journal

Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History is an open-access, online-only, peer-reviewed journal established in 1956 and published under the auspices of the University of Florida. The Bulletin publishes research papers and monographs dedicated to zoology, botany, ecology, paleontology, archaeology, ethnography, informatics, artificial intelligence, museum outreach, and museum education. The Bulletin is indexed in Google Scholar.

Bulletin Polices

Bulletin is published under the auspices of University of Florida and follows the editorial policies of University of Florida Press. The pertinent excerpts from UF Press policies, modified when appropriate to conform with bulletin policies, are summarized below.

Peer Review

Bulletin is a peer-review publication, which includes content evaluation by editor, editorial board, and external referees following best practices from AUPresses.

Self-Archiving

Bulletin permits and encourages authors to post items submitted to our journals on personal websites or institutional repositories both prior to and after publication, while providing bibliographic details that credit, if applicable, its publication. There are no embargoes.

Copyright

By submitting to Bulletin, the authors agree to the terms of the Author Agreement. All authors retain copyrights associated with their article contributions and agree to make such contributions available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license uplon publication.

Plagiarism

Bulletin does not accept articles containing material plagiarized from other publications or authors. For the purposes of this policy, plagiarism is defined as copying of or reliance on work — including text, images and data — by others or yourself without proper attribution. Please be aware that you can plagiarize yourself; you must provide proper attribution in all cases where your previously published material or previously used data or images are included in your manuscript. Plagiarism detected prior to publication will cause rejection of your manuscript. Plagiarism detected after publication will cause the published article to be amended to state that it contains plagiarized material; in extreme cases of plagiarism, the publication will be removed at the Editors’ discretion, and the reason for removal stated on the journal’s website.

Bulletin does not consider the following situations to be plagiarism when proper attribution is made:

  • Translations into English of a previously published paper not in English;
  • Publication of all or part of a revised thesis or dissertation;
  • Publication of a paper previously made public as a conference presentation, white paper, technical report, or preprint

Bulletin follows workflows developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to deal with cases of plagiarism.

Use of Third-Party Copyrighted Materials

When submitting your manuscript, please be mindful of copyright laws in the United States and (if outside the U.S.) your home country. Bulletin respects the intellectual property of scholars, students, and publishers, and we ask that you secure appropriate permissions or evaluate whether your incorporation of images, figures, charts, quotations, and other materials falls within the scope of fair use/fair dealing.

If you are incorporating published materials that you have previously authored, be aware that in many cases your publisher may now own the copyright and you may need to seek permission to reprint your own work.

The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries provides resources on copyright and fair use, with an emphasis on U.S. Copyright Law.

Correction, Retraction, and Removal of Articles

Correction. Despite the best of efforts, errors occur and their timely and effective remedy are considered the mark of responsible authors and editors. Bulletin will publish a correction if the scholarly record is seriously affected (e.g., if accuracy/intended meaning, scientific reproducibility, author reputation, or journal reputation is judged to be compromised). Corrections that do not affect the contribution in a material way or significantly alter the reader’s understanding of the contribution, such as misspellings or grammatical errors, will not be published. When a correction is published, it will link to and from the work. The correction will be added to the original work so that readers will receive the original work and the correction. All corrections will be as concise as possible.

Retraction. Bulletin reserves the right to retract items, with a retraction defined as a public disavowal, not an erasure or removal. Retractions will occur if the editors and editorial board finds that the main conclusion of the work is undermined or if subsequent information about the work comes to light of which the authors or the editors were not aware at the time of publication. Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, inaccurate claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data will also result in retraction of the work.

Removal. Some circumstances may necessitate removal of a work from Bulletin. This will occur when the article is judged by the editors and editorial board to be defamatory, if it infringes on legal rights, or if there is a reasonable expectation that it will be subject to a court order. The bibliographic information about the work will be retained online, but the work will no longer be available through Bulletin. A note will be added to indicate that the item was removed for legal reasons.

Data Sharing

Authors of research papers submitted for publication in Bulletin are encouraged to make the data underlying their articles available online whenever possible. For the purposes of this policy, the term “data” is understood broadly and refers to both quantitative and qualitative research outputs, spanning observations and analysis of social settings (producing numbers, texts, images, multimedia or other content) to numbers attained through instrumental and other raw data gathering efforts, quantitative analysis, text mining, or citation analysis, as well as protocols, methods, and code used to generate any specific finding reported in the paper. The Bulletin’s editorial board prefers that the data be submitted as supplemental files accompanying the article, or be archived in a secure repository that provides a persistent identifier, assures long-term access, and provides sufficient documentation and metadata to support re-use by other investigators. Acceptable solutions include institutional repositories; repositories specifically focused on data curation, or domain specific repositories. If there is no relevant public repository available, and the data cannot easily be included in a supplement, authors should describe how the data are being curated and made available or, in the case where they cannot be made available (e.g., IRB restrictions), why that is so. In any case, a citation to the dataset should be made in the article itself in accordance with the data citation principles of the FORCE11 “Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles”, including an ORCID for the researcher(s) associated with the data. Finally, we recommend that whenever possible authors explicitly define the terms of re-use by assigning a license to their data, choosing, for instance, among Creative Commons or Open Data Commons licenses.

The Bulletin data policy does not require data publication and citation at this time due to still-emergent standards for data peer review; the lack of sufficiently robust and distributed infrastructure to support the variety of disciplinary research occurring in our field; uncertainty whether Bulletin should provide a third mode of data publication in the form of “data papers” or “data descriptors”; and insufficient preparation and notification to Bulletin contributors to ensure datasets are properly curated with the aim of publication. Authors unable to share their data must provide a written explanation of this circumstance in their cover letter at the time of submission.

Conflict/Competing of Interest Statement

Conflict of interest exists when a participant in the peer review and publication process as an author, reviewer, or editor has ties to activities that could inappropriately influence their judgment about the validity of submissions. Therefore, Bulletin requires all authors and reviewers to declare any conflicts of interest that may be inherent in their submissions. For example, financial relationships with industry through employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, expert testimony, either directly or through immediate family, are usually considered to be conflicts of interest. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion. Public trust in the peer review process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how well conflict of interest is handled during writing, peer review, and editorial decision making. Bias can often be identified and mitigated by careful attention to the methods and conclusions of the work. Financial relationships and their effects are less easily detected than other conflicts of interest. Participants in peer review and publication should disclose their competing interests, and the information should be made available so that others can judge their potential effects for themselves. 

  • Authors: Upon submission, authors are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work, or lack thereof. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work. They should also provide a list of potential reviewers for which there is a likely conflict, so editors are able to avoid inappropriate review requests.  
  • Reviewers: External peer reviewers should disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the submission, and they should disqualify themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if they believe it appropriate. Additionally, reviewers are forbidden from using knowledge of the work, before its publication, to further their own interests. 

Open Access and Self-Archiving

Bulletin follows an open access publishing model, meaning that all articles will be publicly accessible on the Internet immediately upon publication. I understand that I may share the submitted manuscript (preprint) of the Submission on the Internet at any point before or after publication, with a citation and link to the final version of record to be added as soon as the issue is available. I may disseminate the final peer-reviewed version at any point after publication.

Authorship and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used in research and scholarly endeavors. While Bulletin recognizes the use and innovation of AI in scholarly endeavors, Bulletin  prohibits authors from listing AI tools as authors or co-authors as these tools cannot take responsibility for submitted works. Authors who choose to utilize AI tools must be transparent in their use by disclosing the name of the AI tool, how it was used, and the reason for its use. Authors are fully responsible for their submitted works. Additionally, Bulletin prohibits editors and peer reviewers from uploading [works and any associated files] to AI tools for analysis, summarizing, or other purposes. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) holds a similar standard, as seen in their Authorship and AI position statement. Other major publishers such as Sage, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, etc., follow similar policies.