About the Journal

Aim & Scope of the Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association (JFMCA)

The aims of the JFMCA are to exchange/share research information about new findings and discoveries, new tools/equipment, the modification & improvement of existing tools, and new techniques for surveillance and control of mosquitoes and other arthropods of medical and veterinary importance. The JFMCA publishes the scope of opinion, forum, reviews, original research articles, scientific notes, operational notes, and the FMCA’s annual meeting abstracts without article processing charges (APC) and page charges for all authors or readers. The JFMCA publishes one volume annually and accepts all submissions from Florida, USA, and worldwide.

History of the Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association

The Florida Mosquito Control Association (former Florida Anti-Mosquito Association organized since 1922) published the report of annual meeting from 1922 (Vol. 1) to 1975 (Vol. 46). The Florida Anti-Mosquito Association changed the publication title from Report to the Proceedings of the FAMA since 1976 (Vol. 47) to 1980 (Vol. 50) annually, only Vol. 50 (1980) was semi-annual. The FAMA has changed the publication title from Proceedings to The Journal of the FAMA Vol 52, 1981, to Vol 60, 1989. Since 1990, the FAMA changed the association name from the FAMA to the Florida Mosquito Control Association (FMCA) and also changed the publication name from the JFAMA to the Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association (JFMCA) with the issued ISSN number for print and published Vol 61, 1990 to Vol. 65, 1993 semi-annually. In 1994, the FMCA published the JFMCA Vol. 65 (last Volume). During the 24-year period, the FMCA irregularly published 10 Volumes of the Technical Bulletin of the FMCA (TBFMCA). In 2018, the FMCA Board decided to continue to publish the JFMCA annually (one Volume per year) with the same number of ISSNs for print and a new number of ISSNs for online, and since 2019, the FMCA has published the JFMCA Vol. 66, Vol. 67, 2020, Vol. 68, 2021, Vol. 68, 2022, Vol. 70, 2023, and Vol. 71, 2024. Also, the FMCA continues to publish the Technical Bulletin of the FMCA irregularly.  

Policies of the Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association

Open Access Policy
JFMCA is a peer-reviewed (single-blind) journal that provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global knowledge exchange. There are no article processing charges (APC) or publication charges, and all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author for non-commercial purposes. Nonetheless, reproduction, posting, transmission, or other distribution or use of the article or any material therein requires credit to the original publication source with a link to the article and the license. This open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative's (BOAI) definition of open access.

Peer Review Policy

JFMCA is a peer-reviewed journal (anonymous reviewers and disclosed authors) that utilizes a single-blind peer review for all submissions. All submitted manuscripts will normally receive 2-3 external reviews from experts within the field. The initial review time is about 2-4 weeks, depending on the topic and the reviewer's availability.

Review Process

All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Editor-in-Chief for suitability, consistency with format, etc. The Editor-in-Chief will typically decide whether to move the manuscript to review, decline the submission directly (i.e., does not fit within the journal's scope), or send it back to the author for more information within seven days.  The Editor-In-Chief assigns a Manuscript to a member of the JFMCA Subject Editors or JFMCA Guest Editors to handle the peer review process once the manuscript moves to review. Manuscript acceptance or rejection is decided by the Subject Editor or Guest Editor, who, based on the 2-3 peer reviewers’ recommendations and the author’s revision situation, then forwards the final version to the Editor-in-Chief for the further process once the review and revision process is completed. During the peer-reviewing process, if the authors are not satisfied or complaint about his/her paper being rejected by the subject/guest editor, the Chief-In-Editor will make the final decision on whether additional peer reviews are needed or not after reviewing the process, subject/guest editor’s decision letter and major reason, and the peer-review recommendation. If the authors are still not satisfied with the rejection by the Editor-In-Chief, then this issue will be brought to the editorial board/ publication committee for discussion and final decision.

Ratings Descriptions

  1. ACCEPT: Publish as is or with editing of typographical errors.  This is rare.
  2. REVISIONS REQUIRED: Publish after appropriate content corrections. The subject/guest editor can judge if corrections were made (i.e., a re-review is not required). 
  3. RESUBMIT FOR RE-REVIEW: Substantial changes are required, and the Editor-In-Chief will decide whether to have re-reviewed. 
  4. REJECT/DECLINE SUBMISSION: Not up to JFMCA standards or not enough new information. 

Guidelines for JFMCA Reviewers

  • Articles published in JFMCA must be of interest to mosquito control and/or public health professionals.
  • The level of the expository material must also be appropriate for the readership.
  • Ideally, articles will interest both experts and non-experts. Although this ideal is often difficult to achieve, any suggestions in this vein will be appreciated.
  • Although JFMCA publishes various articles, they are all expected to be scholarly.
  • Compared to existing literature, submitted manuscripts should represent a reasonably significant advance.
  • The writing should communicate clearly without distractions from poor grammar, incorrect spelling, and poor organization. Figures and tables should be neat, clearly presented, and necessary. These problems can usually be fixed by revising the manuscript.
  • Infrequently, manuscripts lack sufficient detail and are too short. Please delineate what additional information and details would be useful or needed. The more typical problem is excessive length. Please delineate what can be combined, condensed, or removed. It is especially helpful if reviewers give opinions about removing or combining figures and tables.

Quality and Ethical Standards for Articles

JFMCA articles should be prepared with the same care as technical articles; however, the style can be more informal, and some use of the first person may occur. Articles need to reflect knowledge of the appropriate technical literature. At an absolute minimum, authors should search the literature, summarize, and cite appropriate articles on relevant topics. Recent JFMCA contributions can be searched within the Archives on this site.  Authors should also diligently search other relevant journals, including the Journal of American Mosquito Control Association, the Journal of Medical Entomology, and the Journal of Vector Ecology. Submitted manuscripts must be related, in some way, to the field of biology and control of mosquitoes and public health arthropods or closely related disciplines.

Manuscripts that have been published in a non-archival medium, such as Buzz Word/newsletters and organization reports, can be submitted to JFMCA if the publication does not violate copyright agreements and there are significant enhancements to the original article. The original publication must be cited, and the introduction should include specific comments about how the original article has been enhanced. The best way to write the enhanced article is to rewrite the entire article; however, if parts of the article are identical to the original article, overlapping portions of the text must be identified and treated as quotations. Republishing is most appropriate when the original publication consists of preliminary results that can be expanded upon in the JFMCA article. As a rule of thumb, at least 1/3 of the article must be significantly different than the previous article. Articles that have been published in or are being considered by other archival journals should not be submitted to JFMCA.

Presentations from annual meetings and related workshops can also be submitted for publication in JFMCA, assuming they were recast into the proper format for an article. The original presentation venue should be acknowledged (e.g., presented as at the FMCA annual meeting or certain professional workshop). All such submissions will undergo the normal editorial and peer review processes.

Plagiarism and self-plagiarism (reuse of your own material without permission and/or without using proper citation procedures) of copyrighted material owned by someone else is illegal. In practical terms, this means that you cannot cut/copy and paste material from one of your articles and reuse it in a new JFMCA article unless the original source is cited and copyright permission is obtained. The text is treated as a quotation. Also, you cannot copy whole texts or paragraphs from A.I. or search engine software such as ChatGPT. Even if copyright permission is not an issue, plagiarism, and self-plagiarism violate JFMCA standards. If the original source is a JFMCA article and you are preparing a new JFMCA article, do not cut and paste any of the text, including the literature review, to save yourself time – condense the old material, add new material, and rewrite it. Only absolutely necessary parts, such as a table or figure, should be reused, and then the original source must be clearly identified.

JFMCA is published by the FMCA and LibraryPress@UF and expects authors to follow the FMCA Code of Ethics. Failure to meet any of the JFMCA/FMCA standards is likely to result in the manuscript's rejection. Authors who fail to meet the standards involving copyright, plagiarism, and self-plagiarism will have their manuscripts rejected and may be barred from submitting future articles to JFMCA.

Finally, the JFMCA Publications Committee and Editorial Team advise authors to follow additional ethics codes of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) at https://publicationethics.org

Copyright to Your Publication
As described in the Author Agreement, author(s) retain copyright to their publications in JFMCA. The Florida Mosquito Control Association (FMCA) retains the ownership and copyright of the journal. As an open-access journal, we disseminate all content under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0 license). By publishing in JFMCA, authors agree that the terms of this license will be applied to the submission.

JFMCA adopted a CC BY-NC 4.0 license to publish all articles beginning with Volume 68, No. 1. Authors of all articles published before the official adoption of the license retain copyright to their work, granting the Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association the right of first publication.

Self-Archiving Policy
JFMCA permits and encourages authors to post items submitted to the journal on personal websites or institutional repositories both before and after publication while providing bibliographic details that credit, if applicable, its publication in this journal.

Preservation Policy
Content published in JFMCA will be preserved by the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The libraries are committed to the long-term digital preservation of all materials in UF-supported collaborative projects. Redundant digital archives, adherence to proven standards, and rigorous quality control methods protect digital objects. The UF Digital Collections provides a comprehensive approach to digital preservation, including technical support, reference services for online and offline archived files, and support services by providing training and consultation for digitization standards for long-term digital preservation.

Content will be preserved indefinitely unless a specific request to remove a specific item is directed to the journal managers. If you believe that your copyrighted material has been deposited into this journal without consent, please contact the administrators of JFMCA.

Content is also preserved in the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) and CLOCKSS.

Plagiarism Statement
JFMCA does not accept articles containing material plagiarized from other publications or authors.

For the purposes of this policy, plagiarism is defined as copying of or reliance on work — including text, images, and data — by others or yourself without proper attribution. Please be aware that you can plagiarize yourself; you must provide proper attribution in all cases where your previously published material or previously used data or images are included in your manuscript.

Plagiarism detected before publication will cause rejection of your manuscript. Plagiarism detected after publication will cause the published article to be amended to state that it contains plagiarized material; in extreme cases of plagiarism, the publication will be removed at the Editors’ discretion, and the reason for removal will be stated on the journal's website.

JFMCA does not consider the following situations to be plagiarism when proper attribution is made:

  • Translations into English of a previously published paper not in English.
  • Publication of all or part of a revised thesis or dissertation.
  • Publication of a paper previously made public as a conference presentation, white paper, technical report, or preprint.

The Journal of the Florida Mosquito Control Association follows workflows developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to deal with cases of plagiarism.

Use of Third-Party Copyrighted Materials
When submitting your manuscript, please be mindful of copyright laws in the United States and (if outside the U.S.) your home country. JFMCA respects the intellectual property of scholars, students, and publishers, and we ask that you secure appropriate permissions or evaluate whether your incorporation of images, figures, charts, quotations, and other materials falls within the scope of fair use/fair dealing.

If you are incorporating published materials you have previously authored, be aware that, in many cases, your publisher may now own the copyright. You may need to seek permission to reprint your own work.

The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida provides resources on copyright and fair use, emphasizing U.S. Copyright Law: https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/copyright. 

Correction, Retraction, and Removal of Articles
Correction. Despite the best of efforts, errors occur, and their timely and effective remedy is considered the mark of responsible authors and editors. JFMCA will publish a correction if the scholarly record is seriously affected (e.g., if accuracy/intended meaning, scientific reproducibility, author reputation, or journal reputation is judged to be compromised). Corrections that do not affect the contribution in a material way or significantly alter the reader's understanding of the contribution, such as misspellings or grammatical errors, will not be published. When a correction is published, it will link to and from the work. The correction will be added to the original work so that readers will receive the original work and the correction. All corrections will be as concise as possible.
Retraction. JFMCA reserves the right to retract items, with a retraction defined as a public disavowal, not an erasure or removal. Retractions will occur if the editors and editorial board find that the main conclusion of the work is undermined or if subsequent information about the work comes to light that the authors or the editors were unaware of at the time of publication. Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, inaccurate claims of authorship, plagiarism, and fraudulent use of data, will also result in retraction of the work.
Removal. Some circumstances may necessitate the removal of a work from JFMCA. This will occur when the editors and editorial board judge the article as defamatory if it infringes on legal rights or if there is a reasonable expectation that it will be subject to a court order. The bibliographic information about the work will be retained online, but the work will no longer be available through the journal. A note will be added to indicate that the item was removed for legal reasons.

Data-Sharing Policy
Authors of research papers submitted for publication in JFMCA are encouraged to make the data underlying their articles available online whenever possible. For the purposes of this policy, the term "data" is understood broadly and refers to both quantitative and qualitative research outputs, spanning observations and analysis of social settings (producing numbers, texts, images, multimedia or other content) to numbers attained through instrumental and other raw data gathering efforts, quantitative analysis, text mining, or citation analysis, as well as protocols, methods, and code used to generate any specific finding reported in the paper. The JFMCA editorial board prefers that the data be submitted as supplemental files accompanying the article or be archived in a secure repository that provides a persistent identifier, assures long-term access, and provides sufficient documentation and metadata to support re-use by other investigators.

Acceptable solutions include institutional repositories specifically focused on data curation or domain-specific repositories. Suppose no relevant public repository is available, and the data cannot easily be included in a supplement. In that case, authors should describe how the data are being curated and made available or, in the case where they cannot be made available (e.g., IRB restrictions), why that is so. In any case, a citation to the dataset should be made in the article using the FORCE11 "Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles" data citation principles, including an ORCID for the researcher(s) associated with the data. Finally, we recommend that authors explicitly define the terms of re-use whenever possible by assigning a license to their data, choosing, for instance, among Creative Commons or Open Data Commons licenses.

This data policy does not require data publication and citation at this time due to still-emergent standards for data peer review; the lack of sufficiently robust and distributed infrastructure to support the variety of disciplinary research occurring in our field; uncertainty about whether JFMCA should provide a third mode of data publication in the form of “data papers” or “data descriptors”; and insufficient preparation and notification to JFMCA contributors to ensure datasets are properly curated with the aim of publication. Authors unable to share their data must explain this circumstance in their cover letter at the time of submission.

Conflict/Competing of Interest Statement 

Conflict of interest exists when a participant in the peer review and publication process as an author, reviewer, or editor has ties to activities that could inappropriately influence their judgment about the validity of submissions. Therefore, the JFMCA requires all authors and reviewers to declare any conflicts of interest that may be inherent in their submissions. For example, financial relationships with industry through employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and expert testimony, either directly or through immediate family, are usually considered to be conflicts of interest. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion. Public trust in the peer review process and the credibility of published articles depend partly on how well conflict of interest is handled during writing, peer review, and editorial decision-making. Bias can often be identified and mitigated by careful attention to the methods and conclusions of the work. Financial relationships and their effects are less easily detected than other conflicts of interest. Peer review and publication participants should disclose their competing interests, and the information should be made available so that others can judge their potential effects for themselves. 

Authors: Upon submission, authors are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work or lack thereof. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work. They should also provide a list of potential reviewers for which there is a likely conflict so editors are able to avoid inappropriate review requests.  

Reviewers: External peer reviewers should disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the submission, and they should disqualify themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if they believe it appropriate. Additionally, reviewers are forbidden from using knowledge of the work before its publication to further their own interests. 

Copyright Notice
By submitting to JFMCA, the author(s) agree to the terms of the Author Agreement. All authors retain copyrights associated with their article contributions and agree to make such contributions available under a CC BY-NC4.0 license upon publication.

By granting this license, I acknowledge that I have read and agreed to the terms of this agreement.