About the Journal

Soil Organisms presents high-level research results, review papers, and a number of other formats in English covering the complete field of soil biology, including taxonomy and systematics, soil ecology (including interactions), biogeography, morphology, conservation, evolution and ecosystem functions. Unique among soil-biological journals, Soil Organisms especially considers the organismic aspects of soil biology. Three issues per volume are published as one volume per year (issued in April, August and December). Soil Organisms is committed to fair open-access publishing, which is why we offer online open access publishing of all papers without any publication fees.

 

Ethics statement

Soil Organisms follows the rules of good scientific practice according to COPE (https://publicationethics.org/) and “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice – Code of Conduct” of German Research Foundation (www.dfg.de). By submitting their manuscripts, the author(s) confirm(s) that the content of the submitted article complies with these rules, does not contain any plagiarism, all data were collected and analysed legally (including CITES, Access & Benefit Sharing), and investigations were conducted in compliance with all legal requirements and regulations. If any ethical regulations apply (e.g. vertebrate species were included in the study), an ethical statement explaining how the authors considered those must be included in the text. The authors must clearly disclose absence of any financial or private conflict of interests in the cover letter. In presence of such conflicts, this information must be included in the article text before Acknowledgements.

Authorship requires a significant contribution to the research ideas generation and refinement, study design, data collection, data analysis, and/or writing. Technical or administrative support (e.g. documentation or language editing) of the study should be mentioned in the Acknowledgements. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to make sure that all appropriate co-authors are included and all inappropriate co-authors are excluded from the author list and that all co-authors approved submission of the manuscript. Authors take collective responsibility for the work. Cases of scientific misconduct will be considered by the journal editors on one-by-one basis. In cases of plagiarism, data manipulations, publishing malpractices, or other misconduct, an article may be retracted. If authors noticed mistakes in the text, data, presented numbers, statistical analyses, or illustrations that have significant effect on conclusions or potential impact of the article, they should contact the journal and will be invited to submit a correction.

Authors may use AI-based technologies in the writing process to improve readability and language of the work (i.e. for editing existing text) and/or to generate images to improve visual attractiveness of their work. The use of AI-assisted technologies for generation of research content is not permitted. Authors should carefully review and edit all AI-generated outcomes and specifically disclose the use of AI-based technologies in a statement before the Acknowledgements. The authors are still responsible for all contents of the work.

 

Terms of use

Articles published from Vol. 96 No. 3 (2024) onwards are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Articles published from Vol. 80 No. 1 through Vol. 96 No. 2 are available under the previous terms, allowing non-commercial, private, and scientific use.

The Senckenberg Society for Natural History Research (Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, SGN) is a member of the Leibniz Association (Leibniz-Gemeinschaft) and is therefore attuned to the idea of Open Access as explained in the Berlin Declaration (Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge, Berliner Erklärung über den offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlichem Wissen).

Open Access is understood to mean the charge-exempt public access to scientific results via the internet. The users should be able to read, copy, print, search within, and reference the full text without limitation and to use it in any conceivable lawful manner without financial, legal or technical hindrance.

This applies also to the SGN, which publishes various scientific series. Some scientific journals are made available to the public via Open Access in addition to printed copies.

 

Publisher Information

Soil Organisms is published by the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Editorial office: Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz.

Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Senckenberganlage 25
60325 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

 

Subscription

A print version of Soil Organisms is published in three volumes per year. The printed journal is available for sale (Order Form). To buy the print version of Soil Organisms, please fill out the order form and send it to our library either per e-mail or by post (printed out and signed). For information concerning purchase and payment, please contact the responsible librarian in Görlitz at library-gr@senckenberg.de

or
Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz
 - Library -
Am Museum 2
02826 Görlitz
Germany

Terms of sale

Within Germany/Foreign countries: per invoice

Shipment takes place via surface mail. Extra costs will be charged for airmail.