Submissions for the Proceedings of the 9th World Sponge Conference will now be accepted, with a final deadline of 30.9.2014 (see the call on the Conference Webpage on http://199.204.139.176/web/sponge/).

Papers for the Proceedings of the 9th World Sponge Conference will be published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK: http://www.mba.ac.uk/jmba/

Please submit your manuscripts through Manuscript Central: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmba
and notify Christine Schönberg by email when you do so (provide title, authors, abstract; c.schoenberg@aims.gov.au).

We do not presently have any page restrictions, but depending on number of final submissions we may have to ask the authors to restrict the length of their papers to a maximum of 10 printed pages. If you are planning to submit a review paper, please send a draft of your abstract to the journal executive editor Ann Pulsford for consideration (jmba@mba.eclipse.co.uk). When you submit, please make sure that you choose ‘special issue’ from the first drop-down menu and that you state in your cover letter that your publication is meant for the Proceedings of the 9th World Sponge Conference. Please propose 4-5 reviewers who have the expertise to judge your contribution, and you will need to prepare your manuscript according to the instructions of JMBA. Colour images are NOT free and will incur a publication fee of £700 per page (please refer to the instructions for authors). All contributing authors will receive access to the PDF of this volume.

Christine Schönberg will represent you during the submission/review phase and can answer questions with regards to the process. Topic editors are Wei Zhang (biotechnology; Wei.Zhang@flinders.edu.au), Jane Fromont (taxonomy, reproduction; Jane.Fromont@museum.wa.gov.au), John Hooper (taxonomy, systematics; john.hooper@qm.qld.gov.au), Shirley Sorokin (ecology, distribution; Shirley.Sorokin@sa.gov.au) and Christine Schönberg (ecology, physiology; c.schoenberg@aims.gov.au), and we can be contacted with questions specific to our topic expertise.

The editorial team of the 9th World Sponge Conference