EDITORIAL
The past year has been an especially active one for the Annals of Botany and several notable enhancements to its publishing service have been brought successfully into operation. For example, authors of accepted manuscripts can now opt to have their papers made available online with Open Access as soon as they are published without a subscription barrier. Take-up of this option, available since January 2006, has been encouraging. This outcome reflects a growing recognition that the Open Access route is a straightforward way for authors to meet employers' and sponsors' demands that peer-reviewed research is made freely available at the earliest opportunity. It also reflects an increasing willingness of funding agencies to bear the cost of Open Access publishing. Open Access in Annals of Botany is part of a wider policy for archiving accepted material in ways that encourages the earliest possible reader access while ensuring dependable electronic accessibility long-term (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/self-archiving_policyh.html).
Open Access and extra offprints are the only services for which authors of papers in Annals of Botany are charged and each of these services remains optional. Unchanged, and in line with the Journal's not-for-profit philosophy, are cost-free reproduction of colour illustrations both on-line and in print, 25 complimentary offprints, a distributable URL-link to the PDF made available to each corresponding author, and the absence of any author page charges. Since spring 2006, the Editorial Office has also been happy to send alerting e-mails to author-supplied contact addresses that carry a link to the online full text and PDF versions of their newly published article.
Since January 2006, the Journal has been operating the eJournal Press on-line manuscript submission and tracking system. This has proved to be highly popular with authors, editors and referees and has improved substantially the speed and efficiency with which manuscripts are dealt with. It has also made it possible for the Editorial Office to process the ever-growing number of submissions without need for more staff (see more on growing submissions below).
Readers have also seen improvements during the past year. Up to now, all Annals of Botany content back to 1993 has been available online. Of this content, ‘Botanical Briefings’ (our highly cited short reviews), ‘Invited Reviews’, and all papers more than 12 months' old are available on-line without charge. Now, for the first time, the entire Annals of Botany archive is available online, from Volume 1 Issue 1 in 1887 to the present day. This enormous expansion of accessible literature is made possible through the Oxford Journals Digital Archive (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/archives.html). There is a charge for this, but everyone can search the issues and see the titles and abstracts of this older literature without payment. For this and other reasons, readers have been making ever greater use of the Journal on-line and also citing it in their own papers. This growing usage is inextricably linked to a further increase in our ISI Impact Factor, which now stands at 2·665, up substantially from the 2·262 achieved last year. How much further up the scale we can go while continuing to retain our genuinely broad botanical spectrum is an open question, but we are optimistic of further improvement as the quality and quantity of submitted papers continue to rise.
At the time of writing (October 2006), the projected number of papers sent to the Journal in 2006 is well over 900, an increase of approximately 25 % compared with the previous year, which itself saw a 17 % increase over 2004 submissions. This inexorable rise seems set to continue. Since the size of the published journal is not projected to increase at anything like this rate, the number of rejected papers will, inevitably, increase in future. Our present rejection rate of 
75 % thus seems likely to grow. While this situation places the Journal in a strong position to select the most scientifically persuasive and substantial papers from an expanding pool, this does put a potential strain on our evaluation and peer-review procedures. This problem is a common one amongst scientific journals. Clearly, handling procedures and decision-making processes will need to adapt to the mounting number of manuscripts. For example, although the size of the Editorial Board of Annals of Botany has been increased by over 55 % in 6 years, it may require further expansion in tandem with even more stringent manuscript selection procedures.
For many years our journal has placed authors' needs at the forefront of its management strategy. Maintaining this posture while having, of necessity, to turn down a large and growing proportion of submissions represents a considerable challenge. However, authors can be assured that, despite these pressures, the Journal will continue to do all it can to maintain prompt, fair and transparent evaluation procedures that will respect authors' sensitivities and enhance the usefulness of the peer-review process.
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