Latin American and Caribbean Bulletin of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants

The Latin American and Caribbean Bulletin of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants, or Boletin latinoamericano y del caribe de plantas medicinales y aromaticas (BLACPMA, ISSN-0717 7917) is a bimonthly scientific publication directed to diverse professionals and technicians linked to the field of medicinal and aromatic plants. It accepts papers related with the Bulletin's areas of interest, which are agronomy, anthropology and ethnobotany, industrial applications, botany, quality and normalization, ecology and biodiversity, economy and markets, pharmacology, phytochemistry, legislation, information and diffusion of events, courses, prizes, regulations, news, market questions, reports, bibliography, or any other material type that is important to publish.

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The Bulletin publishes articles on original research, reviews, and short communications, written in Spanish, English, Portuguese or French language.

The first BLACPMA was issued five years ago, after a talk held by José L. Martínez (UNICIT, Chile) and Jorge Rodríguez Chanfreau (CIDEM, Cuba), as a communication tool to keep the Latin-American community informed on the many events related to medicinal and aromatic plants taking place around the world. This primary objective is still achieved by means of the so-called “supplements” issued in between each bulletin.

The official launch of the bulletin took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the First Latin-American Congress of Phytochemistry, and it was backed by an Editing Board composed by Arnaldo Bandoni, Argentina; Patrick Moyna, Uruguay; Francisco Morón, Cuba, and Lionel Robineau, Guadalupe, recently replaced by María E. Medina de Nicaragua.

BLACPMA started to feature scientific contributions in its second year of life. Since then, the number of papers submitted to our bulletin has increased steadily as well as their quality, and some of them are signed by highly recognized authors. The Bulletin now receives papers from all over the world on a regular basis.

The complexity of the edition process was increasing accordingly, and it was necessary to engage people specially committed with its supervision. The first ‘supervisor of edition’ was Patricia Landazuri (Colombia), followed by Rita Zeichen (Argentina). Today this critical task is performed by two people, namely Patricia Arenas (Argentina) and Gabino Garrido (Cuba).

The bulletin was soon indexed by LATINDEX,^[1] and recently by the more internationally known INDEX COPERNICUS.^[2] This “step-up” was possible after the radical change that BLACPMA underwent under the impulse of José María Prieto (University of London, UK), who, after January 2004, became fundamental in raising the standards of the bulletin, and putting it in the international scientific arena. Proof of this is the fact that articles published in BLACPMA has started to be cited by other articles published by major journals in the field like Journal of Ethnopharmacology and Economic botany. Recently this journal has been indexed also in QUALYS and REDALYC

Finally, it has been a few years already that under the initiative of Lionel Robineau, we started to work on the idea of organizing our own Symposia. Our efforts have been fruitful and we are now celebrating in Varadero the first Symposium BLACPMA. This was followed by a Second Meeting in La Plata (Nov 2007) where BLACPMA chenge definitively into a FULL JOURNAL FORMAT, featuring more than 5 original papers in each issue and programming the publication of special issues on important subjects of the medicinal plants research and production.

With your help we very much expect to see how BLACPMA continues its evolution until becoming an important reference in the Medicinal and Aromatic Plants field.