Plant physiology and the plant cell go online only.

This year has seen both journals of the American Society of Plant Biologists pass a number of milestones. It has marked Plant Physiology’s 88th anniversary and The Plant Cell’s 25th. It also saw a surge in recognition for both journals in ISI metrics for 2013 that were reported this summer. Indeed, many in the community have noted that the Thomson Reuters Web of Science 5-year impact factor for Plant Physiology rose to 7.908 in 2013, almost a full unit above its position one year ago. The Plant Cell saw a rise to 10.656, confirming both publications in their longstanding positions at the very top of the primary research journals in the plant sciences. Both journals saw a substantial increase in total citations, up roughly 12% to 44,699 for The Plant Cell and to 69,345 for Plant Physiology. Indeed, Plant Physiology remains the most highly cited journal in the plant sciences. More still, both journals can boast well and away the highest 5-year Eigenfactor indexes of all publications in the field: 93 for The Plant Cell and 90 for Plant Physiology. The 5-year Eigenfactor index measures the breadth of citations across all of the articles published over the previous 5 years and reflects the “penetration depth” of the journals within the plant research community. We are tremendously proud of this continuing record of service to the scientific community in plant biology. The new year will see a number of changes for Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell that we hope will add to this service, including our transition to entirely paperless publications. From January 2015, both journals will be available in electronic form online only and will cease to exist in print. If you are one of the very few who still receives a hard copy of either journal, you may want to hold on to this issue as a collector’s item! Unless you are reading this editorial, however, you will almost certainly miss this landmark. Over the past decade, the proportion of subscribers receiving hard copies of the journals has fallen year on year, almost exponentially. This past year, fewer than 3% of individual subscriptions included copies of the journals on paper. During the same period, the number of downloads rose in an unbroken trend. Last year the number of page views online surpassed 6million for the two journals. So, it is only common sense that we concentrate on enhancing the online delivery. Going online-only will reduce the carbon footprint of the journals, and it avoids their printing and distribution costs. These are savings that we are now able to pass on to our membership and subscribers. Indeed, we anticipated this transition one year ago with the move to flat-rate charges for publication. We eliminated costs to authors for color printing and removed the financial penalties for longer articles, both of which we feel are real benefits! The flat rate allows authors the security of knowing what their article will cost to publish, with no hidden surprises. These changes will also help authors and readers alike by encouraging even more beautiful figures and effective supporting data. Of course, brevity benefits scientific publication. We will continue to encourage concise description of experimental results as well as clarity in discussions in all articles we publish. There are other advantages to online publication, not the least of which is the problem of storage for subscribers. ASPB has maintained archiving and storage of the “version of record” in digital format for some years, and this practice will continue unaffected. We will also maintain our online cover gallery to showcase some of the most fascinating of our authors’ work. One change that will be visible to all authors submitting to Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell is our move to a new manuscript-handling system. As of January 2015, both journals will migrate to eJournal Press, familiar to many who have submitted to leading international publications including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature and its sister journals. This migration also has long been anticipated as part of our efforts to improve our service, and we are determined that it will give us, as editors, much closer contact with authors and reviewers as well as speeding our day-to-day operations through a flexible system. There is, of course, much that goes on “behind the pages” of any scientific publication. We are keen to make sure these background activities remain just so— in the background. The editors of both journals have been working with ASPB and eJournal Press staff over the past few months to ensure that submission, processing, and communication is as intuitive and streamlined as possible. We are convinced that this move will serve the journals—and most importantly, the research community—well in the months and years to come.