From the beginning of July 2008 Professor J. S. (Pat) Heslop-Harrison from the University of Leicester (UK) will replace me as Chief Editor of Annals of Botany. Under his guidance the Journal will, I know, continue to respond readily to the publishing needs of plant biology as research with plants, their ecology and commercial exploitation expands and diversifies, especially in Asia and South America. However, while continuing change seems inevitable, some key fundamentals are certain to be retained. These include fair and considerate dealings with authors and maintenance of the highest standards of peer review and publishing integrity.
Now is perhaps an appropriate time to summarize the Journal's development over recent years. If nothing else, such a summing-up may show that a long-established journal such as ours can indeed adapt rapidly to satisfy new needs and exploit the opportunities created by modern technology. The recent past has seen a revolution in the Journal's external appearance (Fig. 1) and also in the quality and usefulness of the papers it publishes. This is something shared with other progressive journals, new and old, that have also harnessed modern production methods and electronic technology to maximize the prospects of publishing good papers and ensuring wide accessibility. Enhancements to our services to authors have been particularly marked. Since 1996, we have allowed authors to include colour illustrations without charge. More recently we have provided short, illustrated summaries of every paper (ContentSnapshots), journalistic accounts of four of each month's articles (ContentSelects) and a cover photograph relevant to one of each issue's papers. For some years, each corresponding author has also received a printed copy of the entire issue in which their article appears. This is in addition to a free personal URL, an ‘electronic offprint’, that gives users access to both the PDF and full text versions of each paper and the offer of 25 free paper reprints of their article. Submitting and reviewing manuscripts is now more straightforward and faster following our adoption of the widely acclaimed EJPress on-line system (http://aob.msubmit.net) in 2006. These features, coupled with our no-page-charge policy and the recently created option of paying to have papers published Open Access, constitute one of the most generous packages for authors currently available to plant scientists. It is authors who generate the science and our policy of supporting them as best we can is fully in line with the stated aim of the Annals of Botany Company to promote the science of botany through its journal. These author-first features may, in part, explain the exponential rise in annual submissions during recent years (Fig. 2). These have risen from 296 in 1996 to almost 1000 in 2007. Thankfully, the upward trajectory has recently shown signs of slackening slightly but not before our rejection rate had risen to approximately 80 %. It is a regret that restrictions of cost and space inevitably mean that some good papers are turned away. Fortunately, increased submissions have coincided with an improvement in the quality of much of the science submitted and the two trends allow us to publish only papers that make a substantial and long-lasting contribution to new knowledge. This is reflected in our ISI Impact Factor, which has risen from 1·045 in 1996 to 2·448 in 2006, some 12 years later. Further enhancements to author service include rapid on-line publication through the advance access AoBPreview, a speeding-up of manuscript processing and of journal production and mailing, delivery of proofs via e-mail, and soon-to-start posting of papers on PubMed Central 12 months after they are first published. Many of the above changes came about as a consequence of the freedom we enjoy, as an independent journal, to switch publishers. In 2003, we moved to Oxford University Press, a highly progressive organization that shares our own ethos of putting academic concerns before strictly commercial interests.
Fig. 1.
Cover layouts from past issues of Annals of Botany.
Fig. 2.
Numbers of papers submitted to Annals of Botany and published between 1977 and 2006.
Readers too have enjoyed marked improvements in provision over recent years. The introduction, in 1996, of regular mini-reviews (Botanical Briefings) and, in 2003, of the more substantial Invited Reviews widened the intellectual reach of the Journal considerably. Both types of article are now made available on-line free of charge to everyone from first publication, while further variety has come from a revitalized book review section and the introduction of ‘Comment’ style papers. The Abstracts of all papers are now structured, making it easier for the essence of each article to be extracted. Furthermore, on-line readers can access, without a subscription barrier, full-text and PDF versions of papers published back to 1993 once 12 months has elapsed from first appearance. In addition, cost-free access by plant biologists based in developing countries has been made possible through the Oxford University Press Developing Countries Online Collection Offer. Readers also benefit from the increased numbers of ‘Special Issues’ and ‘Highlight’ sections devoted to particular topics. Special Issues were once a rarity in Annals of Botany but, in the recent past, one Special Issue has been produced annually on average, and several are currently in the pipeline for this year and next. Readers enjoy facilitated cost-free access to the latest issues of two Chinese-based botanical journals using links from the Annals of Botany home page. This arrangement, with the Journal of Integrated Plant Biology and the Journal of Plant Ecology, is reciprocal and designed to encourage the integration of the three journals into the plant science communities both inside and outside of China. To these features must be added the many virtues of the High Wire Press platform first adopted in 2001. These include a personalized alerting service, access to abstracts and full-text versions of cited papers using CrossRef and similar links, and facilitated downloading of artwork into PowerPoint presentations. Other electronic enhancements such as heightened accessibility through on-line sites such as PubMed, PubMed Central and Medline only serve to highlight the extraordinary improvements in convenience and accessibility for readers that have taken place over recent years.
This high level of accessibility and ease of use largely invalidate complaints that predominantly subscription-funded journals such as ours create a substantial barrier to effective dissemination of scientific knowledge. Such barriers are minimal and were further reduced when papers published between 1993 and 1887 were made accessible on-line for a reasonable institutional charge through the Oxford Journals Archive. Then there is the ‘Oxford Open’ open access scheme that offers authors the option to pay to have their papers made free of subscription access control from the moment of publication. Of course, all abstracts to most papers from the present back to 1951 (when abstracts as we now know them were started) are available to everyone on-line without subscription, as are corresponding authors' contact details. Our current arrangements also enable authors to submit and publish papers free of charge regardless of their current fortunes in the competitive grants system or the state of science funding in their country of origin. This is vital support for those who actually create new science while at the same time making every opportunity for their work to be shared as widely as possible. For authors who value instant universal access to their papers, they can easily pay for this through the Open Access route. The notion that the current system creates artificial barriers to the flow of scientific information is a myth. The amount of readily accessible science has never been greater and our modest subscription charges represent better value for money than ever before.
This Editorial provides the opportunity to acknowledge the many people whose combined efforts have created today's flexible and continually improving journal. The team extends from Annals of Botany's wholly dedicated Editorial Office staff, through to our highly professional colleagues in Oxford University Press, the hard-working and supportive board of Editors and the Annals of Botany Company whose members sensitively oversee the Journal's financing and workings. To speculate how Bayley Balfour, Darwin (Francis), Vines, Marshall Ward and the other founding editors of the journal would judge the 2008 manifestation of their brainchild is mere fancy. However, even if they were to be baffled by the plethora of on-line services, they should at least endorse our expanding international editorial coverage. They initiated the trend by creating an Editorial Office in North America (at Harvard, USA) at the Journal's inception in 1887. We have since extended the network to Australasia (ca. 1983), Japan (1996), Mainland Europe (2003) and to China (2005). We also give increasing amounts of financial support to conferences and speakers in each of these regions as well as attracting a large authorship from them. Of course, there is still much more to do on this and many other fronts as the Journal fulfils its ambition to publish only first rate papers of lasting importance and significance. I wish my successor well in these endeavours.