Annals of Botany 89: 1, 2002
© 2002 Annals of Botany Company
EDITORIAL
Enhanced quality of service to readers and authors of Annals of Botany
This January 2002 issue of Annals of Botany, the first to be published by Oxford University Press for many years, provides an opportunity to summarize the features it offers to readers and authors. We believe the overall package to be unsurpassed in terms of quality of presentation, speed and timeliness of production, article profiling, online service and generosity to authors in terms of colour and offprint provision. Nevertheless, in recognition of the ever-increasing pressures on library budgets of universities and research organizations worldwide, Annals of Botany will remain one of the most competitively priced journals in its field.
Electronic publishing services
From mid-January this year, Annals of Botany will be hosted electronically by HighWire Press, the internet imprint of Stanford University (www.aob.oupjournals.org). The online version will be easy to navigate and will provide links to referenced articles in numerous journals, including a cluster of closely related plant science titles and broadly based publications such as Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The web site will also provide access to OUP’s e-mail Table of Contents alerting service, a highly effective search facility, and will offer links to references in other journals of the CrossRef system, to the Agricola bibliographic database and to abstracts in Medline. It will also have the capacity to include additional data for which space is not available within the printed issue. Subscribers to the printed version of the journal automatically receive password-free access to the online version for all the individuals within their organization. Details of how to subscribe are accessible from the AOB entry page on HighWire (www.aob.oupjournals.org).
AOBFirstAlert
As each paper is accepted for publication, its title, authorship and hot-linked contact e-mail address will be posted in chronological order on AOBFirstAlert. This service is free and provides readers with the earliest possible notice of forthcoming articles and with a ready means of contacting corresponding authors. Articles will be removed only when fully formatted and corrected proofs are moved on to AOBPreview.
AOBPreview
When articles have been formatted and authors have corrected their proofs, pdf versions will be posted on AOBPreview. One by one, these articles will build the coming month’s issue and can be readily previewed online at any time prior to final publication of any given month’s issue. Each article in AOBPreview will be allocated a unique identifying code (the ‘digital object identifier’ or ‘doi’) that can be used in bibliographic searches. The doi and date of publication are carried through when articles are moved on to assemble the normal fully paginated monthly issue, or special issue, whether online or in print.
The complete journal online
From the second issue of 2002, each month’s fully paginated issue will be mounted in full, online, at least 1 week before the start of the calendar month of that issue. The online version will comprise Original Articles, Botanical Briefings, Review Articles and Short Communications transferred from AOBPreview. It will also carry additional features not included in AOBPreview. These include Book Reviews commissioned by members of the Editorial Board and two article-profiling features, ContentSnapshots and ContentSelect. ContentSnapshots will summarize each article in a manner that bridges the information gap between the title provided in the Table of Contents and the article itself. Thus, readers will be able to identify quickly and more certainly which articles are of particular interest and thus merit closer scrutiny. ContentSelect will comprise a set of independent journalistic reviews of selected Original Articles commissioned by the Journal from Professor John Bryant of the University of Exeter, UK. Their purpose is to highlight findings that are topical or likely to interest readers outside the paper’s particular specialization. Botanical Briefings are short, up-to-date reviews on specialist topics which have been a widely appreciated and frequently cited feature of the Journal since 1995. Full text versions of Botanical Briefings are available free of charge to non-subscribers activating the appropriate link on the AOB entry page.
The printed journal
The conventional printed journal is distributed to subscribers in the last week of the month preceding the issue month, using accelerated postal systems where appropriate. It will have the same contents as the online journal. To minimize the frustration often experienced by authors waiting overlong for offprints, authors are given a choice between free access to a pdf version of their paper or receiving conventional offprints, which are now dispatched simultaneously with the Journal direct from the printers. The highest possible quality of reproduction and consistency of figure layout and lettering style is achieved throughout each issue by centralized redrawing and lettering of most diagrams and by the adoption of the latest software-driven printing and reproduction systems. The inclusion by authors of high quality colour photographs and graphics is encouraged by the Journal when this adds significantly to the scientific content or visual clarity.
The new working partnership
The Annals of Botany and Oxford University Press share a ‘not for profit’ philosophy. Neither has shareholders nor a scientific society to support. This allows the needs of authors and readers to be placed uppermost in planning and executing the Journal’s activities. The partnership between Annals of Botany and Oxford University Press has a distinguished past that stretches back to the latter half of the 19th century when a group of British botanists (including Sir Issac Bayley Balfour, Francis Darwin and S. H. Vines), and an American botanist from Harvard (W. G. Farlow), launched the journal with a £200 guarantee fund and the support of The University Printer at Oxford University Press (then known as the Clarendon Press). This original partnership endured until 1975 and is now being renewed in the early 21st century at a time when plant science is evolving to break down the specialized compartments created largely in the last century. From this milieu, a new more seamless plant biology is emerging that demands attractively produced, fast-moving and authoritative means for distributing its peer-reviewed findings to a wide audience. The Annals of Botany and Oxford University Press will be working to cater fully for these needs, and to meet the highest expectations of its many authors and readers. We will try hard to respond to what plant scientists tell us they wish to see in the journals they use and in the way they are run, presented, and made available. Constructive suggestions and comments are always welcome.
Mike Jackson
Chief Editor, Annals of Botany
Cathy Kennedy
Senior Editor, Biology, Oxford University Press
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