In June 2025, the Trakya University Journal of Natural Sciences (TUJNS) reached an important milestone: by partnering with Galenos Publishing House, the journal entered a new phase of professional publishing and began restructuring its editorial and production processes within a more systematic framework. The rationale for this decision was clear. As TUJNS expanded in thematic range and methodological depth, aligning the journal with a publishing environment that is more standardized, more traceable, more ethically transparent, and more discoverable became essential. Galenos is an independent academic publisher founded in 1997 that strongly emphasizes editorial ethics, scientific integrity, digital infrastructure, and international visibility.

In this new period, we strengthened our workflows so that readers can access high-quality science more rapidly and clearly, while authors can benefit from a more predictable editorial experience. At the same time, the journal’s website was updated and given the domain name www.tujns.org. The journal’s scope, policies, author and reviewer guidance, and archive access were reorganized in a more integrated and accessible manner. The redesigned website aims to improve the visibility of TUJNS through clearer archive navigation, more consistent article metadata, and more transparent policy pages. As a result, archive browsing and topic-based discovery have become more practical for readers, while key publishing components, including the journal’s scope, ethical principles, data availability policy, peer review procedures, and appeal and complaint mechanisms, are now more clearly presented for authors.

One of the most visible outcomes of the professional publishing model launched with Galenos is the standardization of article layout and page design. The journal’s typography and page hierarchy now follow a more consistent template, and the resulting uniformity in headings, section flow, figure and table placement, and reference presentation has significantly improved both the readability and the traceability of scientific content, as can already be seen in recent articles published under the new model (Kumru et al., 2025). The active use of the Manuscript Manager online system for submissions and peer review has helped support a more orderly, traceable, and transparent interaction among authors, editors, and reviewers. Therefore, TUJNS has moved toward a structure that not only preserves content quality but also makes its publishing processes more institutionalized and measurable.

As shown in Table 1, although the transition to a professional publisher, the renewed web infrastructure, and the Manuscript Manager submission system took effect only in the second half of 2025, their impact began to be felt almost immediately. Compared with 2024, the total number of submissions increased in 2025; the number of submitting countries increased from 9 to 17; and submissions from outside Türkiye strengthened markedly in both absolute number and proportional share. Notably, the number of submissions from Türkiye remained broadly stable, while its share of total submissions decreased substantially. At the same time, manuscripts began to arrive from a much wider range of countries. Together, these patterns indicate that TUJNS has already begun to gain broader international visibility and appeal. We believe that this trend will become even more pronounced in the coming years, enabling the journal to move more decisively toward becoming a truly global journal and allowing this internationalization to contribute positively to its scientific quality, selectivity, and overall publishing standards.

The rise in total submissions to TUJNS in 2025, the marked increase in the number of countries submitting to the journal, and especially the strengthening of submissions from outside Türkiye show that the journal’s growing international visibility has already begun to produce tangible outcomes. This development is also clearly reflected in the content we publish. In 2024, the journal established a strong thematic foundation ranging from basic biology studies, such as yeast metabolism (Yilmazer & Karaer Uzuner, 2024), to ecological research, such as benthic habitat classification (Tekeli & Aslan, 2024). In 2025, this foundation deepened in a biomedical direction through in silico cancer analyses (Tokcaer Keskin, 2025), and in the second issue of 2025, it broadened even further through work in natural product chemistry and biological activity, environmental health, and applied biotechnology (Awad et al., 2025; Ozojiofor et al., 2025; Servi et al., 2025). Taken together, these developments show that TUJNS has not only grown in volume but is also moving toward a more mature publication profile in terms of subject range, methodology, and international reach. As this trend continues, we believe that both the journal’s scientific impact and publication quality will be elevated, further consolidating TUJNS’s position as a more visible natural sciences journal on the global stage.