Full contents of the Journal are available on the official website of the American Bamboo Society.

The Journal of the American Bamboo Society is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal publishing scientific and cultural information on bamboos. Articles are published individually as soon as reviewing and editing procedures have been completed, and page charges have been received, if appropriate, which can allow very fast publication, usually within a week of acceptance of the final version of a reviewed and edited manuscript.

In order to make the research findings published in the Journal of the American Bamboo Society widely and freely available following the Gold Open Access model, a small article processing charge (APC) is requested from submitting authors, rather than placing the journal behind a paywall for subscription/membership viewing only. Authors are increasingly becoming able to reclaim this fee from their institution or the funder of their research project. This mechanism aims to progressively transfer the financial burden of scientific publication from subscribers/members (often institutional libraries) to the sponsors of research (often the same institution, or funders of the institution). In this way it is hoped to eliminate the need to limit access to research results, which unfairly hinders access to research findings for non-institutional scientists, underdeveloped countries, and the public, and which can delay uptake of new technology for the benefit of all. Open access also greatly increases awareness and citation of publications.

The article processing charge is currently $50 + $15 per page. Authors who have access to institutional or research project funds for the provision of an open access article processing charge (APC) are requested to submit the modest page charge, while those who have no such affiliation, or whose institutions are not yet providing such charges can apply for a complete waiver of the APC. In addition, where corresponding and first authors are from less developed countries, either a fee waiver or 50% discount will be offered, according to Country Group A or B members respectively, following country categories of the Access to Research in the Developing World programme, see www.research4life.org/access/eligibility.

There are no additional fees for color figures. Book reviews and short communications are not subject to page charges at all.

Articles are generally published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license, which provides free access to all, and allows non-commercial reproduction of the work elsewhere under the same license as long as authorship and place of original publication are given. If required by the providers of the article processing charge, articles can also be published under a CC-BY license.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically in any popular format, but preferably using MS Word or LibreOffice Writer. Illustrations are encouraged and their format should ideally be tiff or eps formats, or jpg/png with low compression, or other native formats, but preferably not embedded in a text document. They should be at a size that allows online reproduction with sufficient clarity of detail, typically minimum 2000 pixels for a full page-width figure. Line art such as charts and graphs should have a white background. For the preferred styling of citation and references see most recent edition.

The Journal strives to follow the Code of Conduct of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the requirements of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), as far as is practicable for a modest publication from a small scientific Non-Profit Organisation with limited resources.

Editorial Board

Dr Chris Stapleton PhD, Bamboo Identification, formerly RBG Edinburgh & Kew, UK   journal@bamboo-org

Prof Eduardo Ruiz-Sanchez PhD, Departamento de Botánica y Zoología, University of Guadalajara, Mexico

Prof Lynn G Clark PhD, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, USA

Harry Simmons BSc (Hort), Director, Simmons Family Farms, Texas, USA