Biodiversity: crises past and present, and future challenges

David JW Lane
Department of Biology, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam

This inaugural issue of a new biodiversity journal, Research and Reports in Biodiversity Studies (RRBS), is one of many new scientific Journals that are appearing and competing for ratings in the academic arena. Librarians, institutes of higher education, and funding agencies might despair of being able to source the funding needed to sustain institutional subscriptions or authorship fees for new journals, yet, as indicated below, there has never, unfortunately, been a greater need for advancing and reporting knowledge of biodiversity, its preservation, and its presentation to a wide audience. Open-access journals, such as this one, provide an ideal platform for alerting the scientific and media world to biodiversity issues and the growing threats to the world's living heritage. RRBS, with its open-access, electronic format, has several advantages over traditional subscription-based journals for disseminating new ideas, discoveries, and status reports on biodiversity. For example, while maintaining quality of peer review, throughput times are rapid, articles are not rejected due lack of space, and (being online) expensive production costs for graphics are virtually eliminated. And, of course, articles have free, unrestricted access. This niche in the publishing world and RMBR, specifically, consequently provides a much-needed venue for perhaps one of the most important topics for all humanity today - that of biodiversity.