About the Journal

The Intermountain Journal of Sciences (IJS) began in 1995 with the primary intention to publish the abstracts of presentations or posters made at the annual meetings of three co-sponsoring organizations; The Montana Chapters of the Wildlife and American Fisheries Societies (MTTWS and MTAFS), and The Montana Academy of Sciences (MAS). Thereby, a PERMANENT and ACCESSIBLE RECORD with CONSISTENT FORMATING of their annual meeting proceedings would be available to subscribers including educators, students, libraries and the overall public.

Abstracts from the annual meetings of these co-sponsoring organizations have appeared in each printed volume if submitted by the sponsoring organization(s) for any given year. Since the first volume of IJS was published in 1995, the three sponsoring organizations provided abstracts from presentations or posters at their annual meetings or symposiums in the following years: MTTWS – 1995-2025 (to be continued); MTAFS – 1995, 1997, 2002-2010; MAS – 1995-2001, 2003-2004, 2015-2019. Note: In 2010, the MTAFS membership voted to discontinue providing their annual meeting abstracts in IJS starting in 2011. Furthermore, in 2022 MCAFS opted to discontinue its sponsorship of IJS. The Montana Academy of Sciences has not held an annual meeting since 2020, so their sponsorship of IJS has been suspended. The MTTWS is now the only sponsor of IJS and has submitted their annual meeting proceeding abstracts every year since IJS was first published.

A secondary intention of IJS was to offer a regional peer-reviewed outlet for scientists, educators, and students to submit original research, management applications, or viewpoints concerning the sciences. As of 2020, 194 articles were accepted and published in IJS. An additional 27 articles were published in three special thematic issues in which individual articles were solicited.

An IJS website was developed and in 2013 a partnership with the Montana State University Library to start archiving IJS including all back issues using a system called ScholarWorks. In 2016 MSU Library staff recommended conversion of IJS to a more appropriate archivng and online utility called Open Journal Systems (OJS), which allows free access to all IJS volumes and issues with searchable and printable options. With this recommendation the conversion was done. All volumes and issues of IJS have been archived and are available online through the MSU Library and OJS. Individual articles published in IJS are searchable, but annual meeting abstracts from the sponsoring organizations are only individually searchable in OJS for volumes 16 through 24. Annual meeting abstracts from the sponsoring organizations for volumes 1 through 15 and 25 through 31 are being updated to also make them individually searchable using OJS.

Since 2020 no articles have been submitted or accepted for publication in IJS, so the last printed version of IJS was in 2020. After that, the printed version of IJS was stopped and its printed version discontinued. However, future publications of IJS will proceed in a digital format at MSU using the OJS utility, but will only include the abstracts from the MTTWS annual meetings. See Announcement section on the OJS website to order printed back volumes and issues of IJS.