About Mycology

Mycology

Overview and identity

Mycology, subtitled An International Journal on Fungal Biology, is an open-access international journal on fungal biology based in Beijing, China. It is identified by print ISSN 2150-1203, online ISSN 2150-1211 and Chinese domestic number CN 10-1918/Q, and it is published with Taylor & Francis. The Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which lists the journal among its journals, describes it as an open access journal that publishes research in all fields of mycology, fungi and fungus-like organisms and lichens, whose aim is to provide a platform to meet the needs of a demanding and growing field and to serve and engage dialogue between Chinese mycologists and the international community.

That aim explains the journal's design. Mycology, the study of fungi, expanded rapidly with DNA sequencing, genomics and the recognition of fungi's roles in ecosystems, industry, agriculture and disease, and Chinese fungal research expanded with it. An English-language, open-access journal edited from Beijing, published by an international house and explicitly built as a meeting place between Chinese and international mycologists, was the instrument created to carry that growth.

Launch in 2010 and the first volume

The journal was launched in 2010, and its first volume shows its founding ambitions. The opening article of volume 1, pages 1 to 8, is China's fungal genomics initiative: a whitepaper by An, Wang, Liu and Bennett, setting out a national initiative in fungal genomics at the moment the journal began. A journal that opens with a whitepaper for a whole research field is announcing itself as community infrastructure, not merely as a repository for finished papers.

Coverage records for the journal run from 2010 onward, and its volume numbering reaches volume 16 in 2025 and continues into the period of the fungal biomanufacturing collection announced in 2026. It publishes four issues a year, a quarterly rhythm that, combined with open access, keeps papers flowing to readers without subscription barriers in a field where many specialists work in agriculture, medicine and industry outside major university libraries.

Institutional home in Beijing

The journal is affiliated with the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Mycological Society of China in Beijing. The institute is one of China's principal microbiology research centres and hosts the state key laboratory system for mycology: the State Key Laboratory of Mycology was founded at the institute in 2011, the year after the journal's launch, competitively supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The institute also maintains a mycology and innovative technology laboratory whose stated work covers the diversity, molecular systematics and evolution of fungi, fungal morphogenesis and its molecular mechanisms, and the discovery of bioactive fungal metabolites.

The institute publishes a family of journals, and Mycology's place in that family is specific. Its sister title Mycosystema is a monthly international journal co-sponsored by the same institute and the Mycological Society of China, publishing original peer-reviewed research on mycology with a longer Chinese publishing tradition behind it. Mycology is the family's English-language, open-access, Taylor & Francis-published title, created in 2010 for direct international dialogue. Other institute journals, such as Acta Microbiologica Sinica, founded in 1953, and Microbiology China, founded in 1974, serve microbiology generally rather than fungi specifically.

Subject scope

The journal publishes research in all fields of mycology. Its scope as described for the title covers the fundamental and applied study of fungi, including taxonomy and systematics, in which new species are identified, classified and described and existing taxa revised; fungal ecology and diversity, covering the roles of fungi in their environments, their interactions with other organisms and their biodiversity, especially in under-explored regions; and molecular biology and genetics, using molecular techniques to understand fungal genetics, phylogeny and evolutionary biology. Lichens and fungus-like organisms fall within its stated remit, as the institute's own description confirms.

In practice that breadth runs from the description of edible and poisonous macrofungi in remote Chinese counties to the genomics of model yeasts and filamentous fungi, the molecular pathogenesis of human pathogens such as Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida species, plant pathogens such as the rice blast and wheat head blight fungi, and the industrial use of fungi in fermentation and biomanufacturing. A general fungal-biology journal exists because these communities share methods, sequences and culture collections even when their organisms and applications differ.

The Catalogue of Fungi in China

One of the journal's most visible continuing projects is the Catalogue of Fungi in China series. A 2025 paper in volume 16, the fifth in the series, presents a preliminary survey of macrofungi in Medog, in southwest China, and explains that the series was initiated to systematically and timely report Chinese fungal species, against a background in which about 150,000 fungal species have been reported worldwide and a large number of unknown species remain to be discovered. The paper itself reports new species from Medog County and illustrates the taxonomic work, morphological and molecular, on which the catalogue rests.

The series shows the journal performing its founding aim in both directions at once. It documents China's own fungal diversity, province by province and group by group, for Chinese science, while publishing that documentation in English, openly, with sequence accessions and specimen numbers, so that the international community can use China's inventory as it is built.

Special collections and community role

The journal continues to organise its community through special article collections. In September 2026 the Institute of Microbiology announced that Mycology had opened submissions for a special collection on fungal biomanufacturing, with guest advisors Yongjun Wei of Zhengzhou University and Boyang Ji of the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen, full peer review for submissions, and instructions for authors to name the collection in the journal's submission system. A collection linking a Chinese university laboratory and a Copenhagen institute as guest advisors is the journal's Chinese-international dialogue aim expressed in a single editorial arrangement.

Community leadership also appears in its pages. The journal has published a presidential address on a vision for the innovative study of fungal biology in China by a president of the Mycological Society of China, discussing the stepwise buildup of knowledge and scientific vision that innovative studies require. Journals that carry their society's presidential thinking alongside research and whitepapers are acting as the forum of a discipline, and that is the role this title was built for.

Open access and publishing model

Mycology is a fully open-access journal: its articles are free to read immediately on publication through Taylor & Francis, with digital object identifiers in the publisher's 10.1080 series that incorporates the journal's print ISSN, as in the fungal genomics whitepaper's DOI 10.1080/21501201003658188 and later papers such as the Medog catalogue article at 10.1080/21501203.2025.2471382. Its four-issues-a-year publication with Taylor & Francis Ltd places a Beijing-edited journal inside one of the main international journal platforms, where it is shelved and searched alongside the publisher's other life-science titles.

Open access matters particularly in mycology. Fungal identification and taxonomy are practised by plant pathologists, quarantine officers, clinicians, mushroom growers and conservation workers as well as by university researchers, and many of them work where subscriptions are limited. A journal whose taxonomic descriptions, keys and catalogues can be read by anyone who needs to name a fungus serves its field in a way a paywalled title cannot.

Distinguishing similar titles

The one-word title makes careful citation essential. Mycology is not Mycologia, the long-established Taylor & Francis journal of the Mycological Society of America, whose ISSN is entirely different and whose coverage runs back to the 1940s; the two titles differ by two letters and sit with the same publisher, which makes exact-title checking vital. It is not Mycobiology, the open-access journal of the Korean Society of Mycology published bimonthly, nor Mycosystema, its own Beijing sister journal, nor Studies in Mycology from the Netherlands, nor Fungal Biology from Elsevier. The identifiers that fix this journal are its full title Mycology: An International Journal on Fungal Biology, print ISSN 2150-1203, online ISSN 2150-1211, its 2010 launch and its Beijing institute affiliation.

Readership and use

The journal's readers are mycologists and fungal biologists worldwide: taxonomists describing China's still partly documented fungal diversity; molecular biologists and genomicists following the initiative the journal announced in its first issue; medical and plant-pathology researchers studying fungal pathogens and drug resistance; ecologists working on mycorrhizas, decomposition and fungal communities; and biotechnologists developing fungi for fermentation and biomanufacturing, the audience of its newest collection. Its stated purpose of engaging dialogue between Chinese mycologists and the international community names exactly that two-way readership.

How to cite and find it

The journal is cited as Mycology with year, volume, issue and pages and its Taylor & Francis DOI, and it is listed, with its ISSNs and aims, on the Institute of Microbiology's journals page and on the publisher's platform. Launched in 2010 with a whitepaper for China's fungal genomics initiative, published quarterly and open access with Taylor & Francis, affiliated with the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Mycological Society of China, home to the Catalogue of Fungi in China series and to special collections such as fungal biomanufacturing, Mycology has a clear and verifiable identity as Beijing's international journal of fungal biology.