key: cord-0075350-9geaiw0y
authors: Stadler, Marc
title: Report on the conference on occasion of the 100(th) anniversary of the DGfM
date: 2022-03-04
journal: Mycol Prog
DOI: 10.1007/s11557-022-01774-4
sha: 29a44b83d59aa0bbd4ae26884870e2210184494b
doc_id: 75350
cord_uid: 9geaiw0y

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Fortunately, we have obtained massive funding for the meeting and could thus invite many internationally renowned experts as well as several young mycologists to attend our conference. The DGfM provided stipends for students, and support by the German Science Foundation (DFG) enabled waivers for invited speakers and symposiumchairs. Several international speakers could be attracted by a travel grant from the DFG. Finally, the kick-off meeting of the new EU H2020-MSCA-RISE project "Mycobiomics" (https:// cordis. europa. eu/ proje ct/ id/ 10100 8129), in which some leading research groups from Europe, Africa, and Asia are involved in joint research and staff exchange, was arranged on-site at the conference venue. The PIs of this project and several postdocs and PhD students who are working in the partner institutes of "Mycobiomics" were engaged in the scientific program as well.

We had a very diverse program that covered many aspects of basic and applied mycology, ranging from medical mycology to taxonomy, ecology, lichenology, biotechnology and mycochemistry, as well as genomics and physiology. The program is attached in the Supplementary information.

Herewith I would like to take the opportunity to thank Babett Hübler (DGfM) for assuming numerous administrative tasks necessary to organize the conference and my team manager Christiane Fritz-Braun for her great support in organizing the accommodation and travel of the invited speakers. I would also like to thank Georg Schabel for the excellent photos that we have used for illustration of this editoral (see Fig. 1 for the general program and Fig. 2 for specific participation of the "Mycobiomics" partners).

The conference included a hybrid meeting of the Editorial Board of Mycological Progress in which many of the editors participated either on-site or in a video conference.

Claudia Panuschka (Senior Editor for Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, Virology of Springer Vienna) first presented the Publisher's Report with a very detailed analysis of the journal's performance. From her report, we could see that the journal has developed well over the past years with regard to important metrics, including h5 index, impact factor and the numbers of downloads. We have published ca. 100 articles in average annually, which makes Mycological Progress one of the journals with the highest output in the category "Mycology". The large number of smaller papers, however, is not ideal to increase the impact factor. Therefore, short communications and method descriptions will continue to be accepted only at the discretion of the EiC. However, the options to submit such papers will be made available again in the system. To further improve the standing of the journal, editors and authors are encouraged to submit more (mini-)reviews, opinion papers and larger taxonomic studies.

We will also continue to publish Topical Collections, rather than Special Issues, and encourage prospective (guest) editors to propose respective topics. In contrast to Special Issues, Topical Collections have the advantage that authors are not confined to certain deadlines but their work will be published as regular articles and be given special status (including promotion by the publisher). Presently, the topical collection on "Diversity and phylogeny of wood-decaying Basidiomycota" is still open. We are now planning another topical collection on coprophilous fungi, edited by our EB members Yasmina Marin-Felix and Gerald F. Bills, and are very open for additional suggestions.

From 2022 on, the journal will return to "Continuous Article Publishing", i.e. the papers will appear with page numbers immediately. Every article will start with page 1 and be given an unambiguous "ArticleCitationID". We will thus avoid an "online first queue", which may cause problems with respect to the registration of new fungal taxa.

Further improvements of the production workflow such as the introduction of a manuscript template for authors were also discussed and it was strongly suggested that Springer Nature implements this template because the copy editing process continues to be the most important bottleneck. So long as this is not the case, the copy editors should be given "typesetter guidelines" to make sure that the formatting of manuscripts is maintained throughout the publication process. The inclusion of Mycological Progress in important databases such as MEDLINE/PMC will hopefully be completed during the course of the year 2022.

The editorial board will be further expanded and we have just appointed two new editors and a section editor for papers on yeasts, which have become more important for the journal recently. It was also discussed among the editors to bring in more young scientists and appoint editors that have expertise in modern technologies such as bioinformatics and -OMICS.

After more than 5 years, during which time I have tried to do my best with respect to promote the journal, I feel that it is time for me to step down from the Editor-in-Chief post. This is owing to the fact that I have many other new However, I will continue as section editor for the chemical papers and help with some special topics such as Xylariomycetideae and endophytes and support the editorial team in other tasks if my assistance will be required.

I would like to thank my fellow editors, and in particular Evi Weber and the Section Editors, for their strong support and the excellent collaboration during the past years. I am very sure that the teamwork will continue with the new EIC Marco Thines, and that the positive development of our journal will go on.

In addition to the above-mentioned travel stipends for 17 young scientists by the DGfM, we granted several awards for young mycologists.

The Springer Nature young researcher awards were selected by the Editorial Board of Mycological Progress and went to Anthony Buaya, Lucile Wendt et al. and Miguel Bermudez.

The Oskar-Brefeld prize, which was awarded by the scientific committee of the DGfM, went to Oleksander Ordynets (University of Kassel) for his outstanding work on the taxonomy of aphyllophoroid basidiomycetes (Fig. 3) . During his PhD thesis (Ordynets 2018), complicated, resupinate corticoid genera such as Hyphodontia, Subulicystidium and Trechispora were in the focus of his interest. Afterwards, he complemented traditional methods with morphometrics, Fig. 3 Oleksander Ordynets, the winner of the Brefeld Award (right), with Meike Piepenbring (left) and his PhD supervisor Ewald Langer (center) during the award ceremony using mathematical models to assist in species differentiation. He has also done extensive work on the chorology and the biogeography of these Basidiomycota. Fide Scopus (27/11/21), O. Ordynets published 18 papers in ISI journals, of which 16 resulted from his PhD thesis or his subsequent work as a postdoc in the group of Ewald Langer. On behalf of the members of the scientific committee of the DGfM, I would like to congratulate Oleksander for his outstanding accomplishments!

The online version contains supplementary material available at https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s11557-022-01774-4.

Diversity of aphyllophoroid fungi from taxonomical and biogeographical perspectives

Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for the financial support of our conference. Part of the funding for the conference also came from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (RISE) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101008129 ( project acronym "Mycobiomics"). Last but not least, I would like to thank Mr. Georg Schabel for the nice photographs that he took during the meeting.