EDITORIAL
Chief Editor
Science journals face challenges from rapidly evolving business models, diminishing library budgets and an increasing array of technological options for delivering content and processing submissions through peer review. The Annals of Botany is responding by continually improving the service it provides to authors, readers and to its subscribers. Accordingly, several enhancements and further streamlining are planned for 2006. We already make all our ‘Botanical Briefings’ and ‘Invited Reviews’ available free of charge online from first publication. Annals of Botany now offers all authors the possibility of Open Access for their papers on payment of a fee (£1500/$2800) that is discounted by almost 50 % if an author's institution subscribes to the Journal. Authors from developing countries will pay nothing for open access or be charged a minimal amount depending on each individual country's status. More information can be found at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/. Electronic access to back issues will be improved dramatically from early 2006. At present, access extends to 1993 but, in the next few months, it will become possible to view PDF versions of all papers published in Annals of Botany back to the first issue, published in 1887. This unprecedented coverage of 118 years of botanical research will, for example, make the Journal's early classic papers readily available on the Internet for the first time. At a more prosaic level, the Annals of Botany website (www.aob.oxfordjournals.org) has, in common with other journals linked to Oxford University Press, received a face-lift and now offers such features as a downloadable botanical Screensaver, and an ‘E-letters’ facility allowing readers to comment on published papers online. A further enhancement gives readers the possibility to download photographs, diagrams and other artwork directly into ‘PowerPoint’ slides without the need for intermediary steps. A further, and major, development is the imminent introduction of a web-based manuscript submission and tracking system. After testing three rival products, Annals of Botany has adopted the EJPress system currently employed to good effect by such journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, British Journal of Nutrition and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Its adoption will bring benefits of increased speed and convenience throughout manuscript submission and evaluation. Furthermore, users at all levels will benefit from a unique navigation system in which key actions are guided by prominent alerts and context-sensitive help points.
The Journal has also been active in other ways, Two Special Issues concerned with ‘Plant Genome Size’ and ‘Flooding Stress’ were published last year. These were made available without charge immediately on publication and were an addition to the normal 12 monthly issues on which the normal, and modest, subscription price is based. Each Special Issue originated from an international conference for which the journal was pleased to give considerable financial support. Annals of Botany has also helped to finance a range of other international conferences over the past year. These include sessions on ‘Root Structure and Function’ and on ‘Pollination Biology of the Lamiaceae’ at the XVII Botanical Congress in Vienna, Austria, and on ‘Comparative Plant Ecology’ at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Montreal, Canada. Additionally, finance was provided for three lead speakers at the 15th International Plant Nutrition Colloquium, Beijing, PRC, and for two speakers at the Association of Applied Biology meeting on ‘Plant Oxygen Stress’, Bristol, UK. Individual speakers were also funded at ComBio 2005, Adelaide, Australia; the Botanical Society of America Annual Meeting at Austin, USA; the New Zealand Society of Plant Physiologists Annual Meeting at Lincoln University, NZ; and the Linnaean Society/Royal Botanic Garden Kew conference on Palms at Kew, UK. In these ways, Annals of Botany has returned a sizeable portion of its income to the botanical community as a means of supporting excellence in the science while also promoting the Journal and helping to attract good papers to its pages.
The services offered to authors by Annals of Botany continues to evoke a positive response. In 2004, a record 579 submissions were received, up from 503 the previous year. At the time of writing, submissions for 2005 were set to exceed 600. The steady rise in submissions in recent years (they have almost doubled since the year 2000) has led to a marked increase in selectivity and to a current acceptance rate of approximately 35 %. Readers too have been using the Journal to an increasing extent. This is evident in the download figures for full articles from the journal's website. These increased over 3-fold between 2003 and 2004 and a further substantial increase in electronic usage seems likely by the end of 2005. The increase not only reflects a rise in the electronic access of science generally but also the increasing citeability of papers we publish. The outcome has been a gratifying rise in our ISI Impact Factor, up from 1.370 to 2.262 in the past year.
The Annals of Botany works to raise the quality and importance of the science it publishes, to promote the ease and speed with which submitted manuscripts are processed through to publication and to improve the accessibility of papers after they are published. As always, readers' and authors' comments on the Journal's performance, and suggestions for further improvement, will be warmly welcomed.
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