Volumes of the journal are typically published annually, although this schedule has varied over time as the resources of The Royal Society of Queensland have allowed.[2]
While the scope of The Royal Society of Queensland encompasses all of science, including the social sciences that follow scientific method, the scope of the journal is more limited, being restricted to the natural sciences and observations about natural resources and the environment from within other disciplines. However, 'natural sciences' is itself interpreted broadly and also, the journal publishes papers on science policy, science education and science opinion.
All papers are single-blind peer-reviewed.
Value of local and regional journals
The 2021 Honorary Editor, Dr Julien Louys of Griffith University, published a strong defence of regional journals like the Proceedings in his Editorial Foreword to Volume 129:
"The science reported in the following pages represents strong observational data, rigorous interpretations, and discourse that will resonate well beyond the state. Nevertheless, there is a wide-ranging perception, increasingly common across universities and funding bodies, that science should only be published in flashy, high-profile, or international publications. Unfortunately, excellent publications such as the Proceedings are not seen as desirable or even worthwhile venues to submit science. It has even reached the point where academics have been actively discouraged from publishing in more local or regional journals, being informed that such publications would detract from their professional records...
"Such journals provide one of the few remaining outlets for purely local or small-scale scientific observations. This scale may be small from a topical or geographical perspective but can be enormous from a scientific perspective. The grand narratives, the meta-analyses, and the increasingly popular ‘big data’ driven research agendas do not occur in isolation but critically rely on local observations and smaller-scale studies…
"The Great Barrier Reef, one of the natural wonders of the world…is composed of thousands of individual reefs, each in turn composed of billions of coral polyps, each building on the structures left by previous polyps. In much the same way do scientific contributions build upon one another, dependent on the small, local and (according to some) seemingly insignificant outputs."[3]
Special issues
In addition to the annual Proceedings of The Royal Society of Queensland, the Society has also published a number of special editions on topics of scientific and community interest at the time:
1976 The Border Ranges: A Land Use Conflict in Regional Perspective
2020 A Rangelands Dialogue: Towards a Sustainable Future (Vol. 127).
Digitisation
In 2014, The Royal Society of Queensland undertook a major project to digitise all past issues of the Proceedings, the Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Queensland, special editions, and a range of assorted historical records. This digitisation effort aims to make this scientifically and historically valuable collection more accessible to scientists, historians and the public generally. Full text search capability is now available back to Volume 1, although issues after 1956 are behind a paywall and the scanned text is yet to be rectified.
In December 2019, the Society resolved to publish the Proceedings online with open access, commencing with Volume 124. In 2021, it added DOI references (prefix 10.53060).
Honorary editors
2018 Dr Barry Pollock
2019 Ms Revel Pointon, Dr Ross Hynes, Dr Geoff Edwards
↑Trove entry for the 2023 publication - Proceedings of The Royal Society of Queensland, The Royal Society of Queensland, 19 November 2023, archived from the original on 22 February 2024, retrieved 22 February 2024 - relevant to publication of 2023-11-19
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