Finnish Society of Forest Science established Silva Fennica already in 1926 for publishing “short reports”, i.e., articles like today’s journal articles as opposed to the monograph publishing prevailing at that time. The journal first appeared occasionally, after enough suitable papers were submitted. In 1967, Silva Fennica was converted to a quarterly scientific journal. English became the only publishing language of Silva Fennica in 1994. In the same year, online publication of the abstracts began. Open access publication of whole text articles in the Internet began in 1998. Our first manuscript handling system was taken into action in 2013. We have also taken steps towards open science with enhanced transparency and reproducibility of the articles published in the journal.

Thus, Silva Fennica was among the first international scientific journals to go online, and we are pioneers of open access publishing. However, during recent years we received some negative feedback on our manuscript handling system. To mention a few critical points, some information, such as emails and written statements have been lost, the manuscript information has not been unambiguously updated and confirmation on returned revised manuscripts has not been sent to the authors. For example, the last point has raised a lot of confusion and questions. All these problems have harmed the work of both authors and reviewers, and also the Editorial Office. Therefore, during 2021 a correcting action was decided to be taken by changing the manuscript handling system.

Now we have finalized the process of changing the system and can announce that Editorial Manager provided by Aries Systems is the new manuscript handling system of Silva Fennica (https://www.editorialmanager.com/sf). This is also the case for the Finnish-language journal Metsätieteen aikakauskirja and the monograph series Dissertationes Forestales published by the Finnish Society of Forest Science. With this change, we believe to improve our services for the authors and reviewers and also for ourselves. We expect that from now on, the abovementioned critical points no more exist. For example, authors are aware of the status of their manuscript and the changes in it. Furthermore, the authors know who are responsible for managing their manuscripts and who to contact. They can also suggest preferred and opposed reviewers. Correspondingly, the reviewers are clearly informed of the deadlines of their tasks. We in the Editorial Office are happy to improve our services in the form of robust, clear and standardized manuscript handling without any unexpected delays in the processing phase. The manuscripts now in process will still be handled in the old system but all new ones will go to new Editorial Manager.

During this process we have also renewed our website (https://silvafennica.fi). In this case the changes are not very visible to the user. However, the website is completely reprogrammed using modern coding techniques, which enables technically smoother functioning and improved cyber safety. With these changes, we further want to guarantee the safe and easy manuscript handling, archiving and open access. With all these changes we also hope to continue our independent and non-commercial journey towards Everyone’s Right to Forest Science. We are ready to handle your submitted manuscripts with improved and state of the art tools.

Matti Maltamo
Editor-in-Chief