'The Overstory' Article Submissions

A free international journal for agroforestry

The Overstory E-Journal is a free agroforestry email journal, currently with over 8,000 subscribers in 184 countries. The Overstory is an excellent venue to present your work to a worldwide audience of educators, extension agents, researchers, consultants, students, and practitioners. We are looking for well written survey articles that are of interest to a broad audience.

The Overstory is a unique source of information for agroforestry. Each bi-monthly edition consists of a feature article covering a topic related to trees and their roles in agriculture, natural ecosystems, and human culture and economy. We do not publish the results of local studies, but rather specialize in articles with a broad perspective on a particular concept, with examples given from many regional studies.

Here are some aspects we are looking for in an article submission:

• Written for a general, worldwide audience of educators, extension agents, researchers, consultants, students, and practitioners
• Survey articles covering a topic related to trees and their roles in agriculture, natural ecosystems, and human culture and economy
• Well written in English (American, British, or Australian English are all acceptable)
• Written in third person
• Presents brief examples of systems and species from a wide variety of environments
• Between 2,000 and 3,000 words, excluding references
• Full references must be included
• High standards of integrity (all quotations from other works cited, others' results cited, scientific claims substantiated with data, all contributors acknowledged, etc.)
• May summarize a longer publication, however, written permission from the original publisher must be granted.
• Author (and publisher, if applicable) gives The Overstory permission to publish articles by e-mail, internet, and as part of a hardcopy compilation of past editions.

Topic choice

Since established in March 1998, only a handful of unsolicited articles have been published in The Overstory. The most frequent reasons we do not publish submitted articles are that people send us case studies or articles written in poor English.

Examples of appropriate topics:

• • agroforestry
  • non-timber forest products
  • indigenous knowledge
  • systems integrating silviculture
  • pasture and/or aquaculture
  • farm forestry
  • economics of agroforestry
  • small-scale forestry
  • training and education

Examples of inappropriate topics (There are other forums for this type of material.):

• • results from a research project
  • local case studies
  • editorials
  • political or environmental policy
  • recycling and pollution reduction
  • genetically modified organisms
  • nuclear technologies, etc.

Wish list for future article topics

Although we encourage submissions on a very wide range of topics, we are particulary eager to receive submissions in the following areas:

• Agroforestry for meeting Millennium Goals
  • year round fruit production
  • perennial leaf vegetables
  • temperate edibles for use in a perennial homegarden
  • agrodiversity: ecological and economic benefits
    
    
• Bamboo in agroforestry systems
  • highly useful multipurpose species of bamboo
  • interactive learning environments
  • soil foodweb in multistory agroforestry systems
  • mangrove agroforestry
  • protecting indigenous rights
    
    
• Comparing pests and diseases in mono- and polycultures
  • human waste for fertility in perennial cropping systems
  • food insects with tree connections
  • perennial vegetables (temperate climate)
  • multistory tree gardening (temperate climate)
  • biodiversity benefits of agroforestry
  • monocultures and polycultures, their benefits and drawbacks
  • agroforestry for poverty alleviation
  • agroforestry in saline soils
  • value-added products from agroforestry
  • medicinal plants in agroforestry
  • agroforestry and watershed protection

Submitting an article

Submissions are accepted preferably in Word format or under certain circumstances as email text sent to overstory@agroforestry.net. Submissions may be reviewed by one or more outside professionals and will be kept confidential until published. By submitting a piece to us, you are giving your permission for us to publish it. When we publish an excerpt of a longer article published elsewhere, we will clearly acknowledge the original (full) source. If your article is over 3,000 words in length, we can post the full article to our web site, if it does not appear elsewhere. If your submission is an excerpt of a previous work, please indicate whether you can get written permission from the original publisher for us to publish the excerpt. There are no publication charges.

Craig Elevitch, Editor
The Overstory
Permanent Agriculture Resources
P.O. Box 428
Holualoa, HI 96725 USA
Tel: 808-324-4427; Fax: 808-324-4129
Web site: Agroforestry.Net