About the Journal

Italian Journal of Agrometeorology (IJAm)

The Italian Association of Agrometeorology (AIAM) was founded in 1997, and since then it has been working to enhance, promote and patronize agrometeorologists. Moreover, it also aims to promote and encourage dissemination initiatives to increase the knowledge of agrometeorology and agroclimatology, both in the agricultural sector and outside of it. Over the years, AIAM has worked to promote the connection between service activities and research and development ones, more related to Universities and research centres. This connection had, and still has, the result of promoting researches on relevant agrometeorological themes, both at the farm and territorial level.

This makes AIAM a peculiar association, because it brings together researchers and technicians, in a virtuous circle that puts the knowledge of the needs of the agriculture in contact with scientific research, and vice versa.

One of the activities that AIAM carries out annually is the organization of a national scientific conference, which year by year addresses the typical and most interesting issues of the moment. Then, there is the organization of courses designed to promote and foster education, training and updating in agrometeorology.

Last but not least, the association publishes a scientific journal, named Italian Journal of AgroMeteorology. We started, about 15 years ago, with a short bulletin almost homemade, and now the Journal is published by Firenze University Press (FUP), with a completely Open Access approach. Impact Factor was obtained in 2014. After a period of decrease, the IF of the IJAm has risen up to 0.933 in 2019. This result is very conformant and gratifies the efforts made by the Editorial Board, the Field Editors and the entire AIAM investing in the Journal large economic resources. We are really sure that the collaboration with FUP will be profitable and will bring consistent advantages, allowing the national and international agrometeorological community to use an important Open Access journal for the presentation of the results of scientific research and innovation and development projects.

The issues of interest to IJAm are wide and extremely current (food security, precision agriculture, climate change, sustainability, etc.) and we wish an increasing interest towards a Journal that must become a fundamental support to scientific communication.

Simone Orlandini, Francesca Ventura

Among the areas of specific interest of the journal there are: ecophysiology; phenology; plant growth, quality and quantity of production; plant pathology; entomology; welfare conditions of livestocks; soil physics and hydrology; micrometeorology; modeling, simulation and forecasting; remote sensing; territorial planning; geographical information systems and spatialization techniques; instrumentation to measure physical and biological quantities; data validation techniques, agroclimatology; agriculture scientific dissemination; support services for farmers.

IJAm is Scopus indexed and obtained the recognition in ISI Web of Science.

RIGOROUS PEER REVIEW

Each submission to IJAm is subject to a rigorous quality control and peer-review evaluation process before receiving a decision. The initial in-house quality control check deals with issues such as competing interests; ethical requirements for studies involving human participants or animals; financial disclosures; full compliance with IJAm's data availability policy, etc. 
Submissions may be returned to authors for queries, and will not be seen by our Editorial Board or peer reviewers until they pass this quality control check.
Each paper is subjected to critical evaluation and review by Field Editors with specific expertise in the different areas of interest and by the members of the international Editorial Board.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

The Italian Journal of Agrometeorology provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, Firenze University Press at the University of Florence, complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access: By “open access” , we mean the free availability on the public internet, the permission for all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain is to guarantee the original authors with control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. We support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in our journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0). Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication without embargo. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

PUBLICATION FREQUENCY

Papers will be published online as soon as they are accepted, and tagged with a DOI code. The final full bibliographic record for each article (initial-final page) will be released with the hard copies of IJAm. Manuscripts are accepted at any time through the online submission system. The issues and the hard copies are published semiannually.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Authors who publish with IJAm agree to the following terms:

• Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in IJAm.
• Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
• Authors are allowed and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

PUBLICATION FEES

Open access publishing is not without costs - AIAM and FUP are not for profit organization - IJAM therefore levies an article-processing charge of € 250,00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable. The cost is reduced to € 150,00 for AIAM members in good standing with the payment of membership fees.

PUBLICATION ETHICS

Responsibilities of IJAm's editors, reviewers, and authors concerning publication ethics and publication malpractice are described in IJAm’s Guidelines on Publication Ethics.   

CORRECTIONS AND RETRACTIONS

In accordance with the generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing, IJAm does not alter articles after publication: "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible".
In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct IJAm publishes corrections and retractions (expressions of concern).