Athena Closes Two More Journals and Further Consolidates STM Journals Portfolio

Athena International Publishing regrets to announce the closure of two more journals: “Growth and Form” and “Natural Language Processing Research” will be discontinued. Both journals transferred to Athena from Atlantis Press in 2022 after they were acquired by Springer Nature, but have struggled to achieve a regular content flow since then. The move marks a further consolidation of Athena's STM journals portfolio.

Growth and Form was launched in 2019 by Atlantis Press as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted to the geometric analysis of growth and form, static and dynamic, as visible in such areas as biology, chemistry and physics. It published articles from various fields which exposed the variability or correspondence in natural shapes and phenomena, and/or described mathematical and geometrical strategies to understand natural shapes, their variability and their development. After launching, the journal successfully published two volumes in 2020 & 2021 with its previous publisher Atlantis Press, but when they were acquired by Springer Nature in 2021 it was decided that Growth and Form would not be retained post acquisition. Hence the journal was transferred to Athena International Publishing in 2022 by its Founding Editor Johan Gielis. Despite efforts to expand the Editorial Board and revise the editorial strategy aimed at attracting more submissions, the journal struggled to achieve a regular content flow. Going forward, articles fitting the scope of Growth and Form will be transferred for consideration to be published in the proceedings of the International Symposium on Square Bamboos and the Geometree (ISSBG). The proceedings of the inaugural edition of this annual event have also been published by Athena as part of the series Athena Transactions in Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

Natural Language Processing Research was also launched by Atlantis Press in 2019 as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal covering all disciplines of computational linguistics, natural language processing and machine learning. The journal published two double issues in 2020 & 2021, but suffered a similar fate as above when Atlantis Press was acquired by Springer Nature in 2021 and it was decided not to retain the journal. Some more articles were published after the transfer to Athena, but the journal never achieved a regular submission flow as an unindexed open access journal in a highly competitive field. Ownership of the journal has now been returned to the Editor-in-Chief and Founding Editor Kan Li, although no concrete plans currently exist for continuing the publication.

Following this decision, both journals are no longer open for new submissions effective immediately. The archives of published articles will remain available on the Athena platform, as well as in the e-Depot of the National Library of The Netherlands. All metrics for both journals will continue to be updated where relevant.

Athena International Publishing is an open access publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information which was founded at the end of 2021 to further support the efficient dissemination of “sound science” and the advancement and exchange of scientific knowledge. The company headquarters is based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands and our team consists of a group of publishing professionals with more than 150 years of combined experience across all major STM publishers and service providers in the industry. The Athena publishing portfolio consists of journals, book series, conference proceedings and books covering all STM disciplines including Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Biology and Life Sciences, Health and Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. All our publications are Open Access and hence free to read, download, copy and distribute under the terms of the applicable Creative Commons end-user license. For more information, please visit https://www.athena-publishing.com.