Information for Contributors

This monographic project started out several years ago as a well-intentioned attempt to produce a single published book detailing the conservation biology of all freshwater turtles (and later adding tortoises as well). However, after many years of frustratingly slow completion of species accounts it became clear that we would never achieve completion of all accounts at a single point in time, since older accounts were becoming out-of-date by the time newer accounts were prepared.

We finally realized that what we needed instead of a single one-time published book was the gradual publication of accounts as they became finalized. With the advent of legitimate online publishing capabilities this model has now become a reality. All accounts in this on-going project will first be published online with official DOI numbers to make them immediately available and citeable. Subsequent to this, all accounts published online each year will also be released in printed high-resolution harcopy format by the end of each year (in late December) to ensure permanence of the publication. Annual volumes will be released until the project reaches its completion (or extended indefinetely as accounts also begin to get revised).

Contributing Authors

Original Accounts

Authorship of accounts is by invitation only, but we encourage any of you with expertise on particular turtles or tortoises to contact us <[email protected]> about volunteering to take on (as senior author) or to join an account (as a co-author), or eventually, to help revise an already-published account (see below). Most species accounts have already been assigned, but a few unassigned ones remain. Most accounts have been done or assigned at the species level, but we are gradually increasing our coverage to also include individual subspecies accounts, and there are many opportunities for volunteering to take the lead on authoring such accounts. If you are interested, please contact us at the e-mail address above.

Accounts already Published, or In press, or In prep., are listed in the Table of Contents; any accounts listed as In prep., or not listed at all, are still available for new authors with relevant data for those species to be considered for authorship on the account, or to be considered to join existing authors as a co-author on the account. Please contact us at <[email protected]> if you would like to be considered for an authorship role. We encourage potential contributors to volunteer to help.

Revised Accounts

As time progresses, accounts produced early in this project will gradually become increasingly out-of-date. As this begins to occur we encourage any of you, especially the original authors of the accounts, but also new authors, to contact us about revising and updating the account. If someone new (not one of the original authors) wants to help revise or take the lead on revising an older account, we will contact the original author(s) and make a joint decision as to the best way to move forward with a revision that would also include the input and probable authorship or co-authorship of the new people volunteering to lead or help with the process.

Any such revised account would then become the online replacement account for the species or subspecies in question, with the older account still remaining available as an archived document on the website (and in hardcopy form). This process will help assure that the whole project will remain up-to-date and hopefully functional and relevant for many years to come.

Account Format Guidelines

For authors wishing to consider authoring or revising an account, we require that our standarized account format be followed.
Format guidelines for accounts are available here as a download .doc.

Contributing Photographers

We encourage any and all who have good photographs of freshwater turtles and tortoises to consider submitting them to us for consideration of inclusion in upcoming new accounts or eventually revised older accounts. Photos may be submitted either by authors of accounts or anyone else, and need to include information as to who the photographer is, what species or subspecies is being photographed, and where the animal was from (either specific or general location). Photos need to be in good focus and digitally scanned in color and submitted as jpg files with at least 600 dpi resolution, but 1200 dpi preferred. For each species we hope to publish the following types of photos: 1) a portrait-style photo of a whole animal in reasonably natural habitat to serve as the frontispiece photo for the species and included on the webpage for the species account summary; 2) detailed carapace and plastron shots of an adult; 3) a close-up head shot of an adult; 4) dorsal and ventral shots of a hatchling; and 5) consideration of publishing a habitat or other special photo if especially informative and/or warranted. If you are interested in submitting photos, please contact us at <[email protected]>. All photos used will be acknowledged in the published accounts and on this website on the page for Contributing Photographers. Thank you.