About the Journal

A Brief History of the Intermountain Journal of Sciences

by Terry Lonner (co-founder)

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 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 of IJS including educators, students, libraries and the overall public in printed form only.

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 - 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 MTAFS 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 apparently been suspended. MTTWS is now the only sponsor of IJS and has submitted their annual meeting proceedings abstracts every year since IJS was first published in 1985.

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 but is no longer functional, because in 2013 a partnership with the Montana State University Library to archive IJS including all back issues using a system called ScholarWorks. In 2016 MSU Library staff recommended conversion of IJS to a more appropriate archiving 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 began. All printed volumes and issues of IJS have been archived and are available online through the MSU Library and OJS. This includes all individual articles published in IJS and annual meeting abstracts from the sponsoring organizations. Some individual meeting abstracts were only available as one large pdf and were not searchable. Now all annual meeting abstracts are individually searchable using keywords and OJS and can be downloaded as a Pdf.

After 2020 no articles have been submitted or accepted for publication in IJS, so the last printed version of IJS was in 2020 and manuscript submissions were no longer accepted. 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.