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During my time as Editor in Chief, I have tried to maintain some of the core features of manuscripts published by The Plant Cell, yet change some things for the better. I have held firm to “The Plant Cell brand” of manuscript as a trademark for the journal and resisted some very strong pressure to feature short, of-the-moment articles that lack the supporting evidence of longer articles. My reasons for resisting such articles were that authors and reviewers have come to a common image of “a Plant Cell manuscript” that would be difficult to change. Indeed, it is a product that is unique in the field: very-high-quality data and images, mechanistic insight, combinations of approaches and methodologies to address the topic of the manuscript, and the appropriate controls and supporting data to make the interpretations truly compelling. These types of manuscripts have staying power in the field of plant biology and are very highly cited, especially over the longer term, which is of considerable importance to authors. The quality of the research in The Plant Cell makes its content relevant to the community over decades. In contrast, features based on short articles, while always introduced with aspirations for punchy, sexy articles that capture the imagination of the community without tedious (and, by implication, unnecessary) supporting data, often degenerate into repositories for unfinished projects or pieces of work that lack those critical experiments that establish the importance of observations. This problem can be seen with EMBO Reports, which has evolved from a short-format scientific journal to one more concerned with social and political commentaries on science because the number of quality, short, scientific reports is simply not high enough—those go to Nature and Science.
Beyond maintaining “The Plant Cell brand” of quality, I have tried to improve the journal in several ways. My first objective was to make the journal more international, and I think this has largely been achieved. To encourage contributions from countries outside the United States, I have expanded the editorial board to include more Australians, Europeans, and Asians. In 2007, there were 33 coeditors on the board, of whom 11 were non-U.S. based. Currently, we have 36 editors on the board, of whom 19 are non-U.S. based. A more diverse editorial board has kept the scientific expertise and opinions broad, which are attributes of vital importance in adapting the journal to future trends and securing its long-term status. It has also allowed the essential mix of experience with more youthful enthusiasm on the editorial board.
Submissions to The Plant Cell have risen year on year, from 659 in 2007 to 967 in 2013 (projected to be >1050 in 2014). Of these, 70% of submitted articles and 62% of the accepted articles were from outside the United States in 2007. In 2013, these figures were 73% of submitted articles and 71% of published articles from outside the United States, attesting to the fact that The Plant Cell has become a truly international journal.
I have talked up The Plant Cell around the world and encouraged authors, particularly young authors, to submit their work to the journal. This activity has been mirrored by the editors on the board who have tirelessly supported and promoted the journal and encouraged the next generation of scientists to submit their work to us. Barry Pogson and Bill Lucas require special mention and commendations in this respect. In addition, we have run very popular “How to Publish” workshops over the past three years at the ASPB Plant Biology meetings, in cooperation with our sister journal, Plant Physiology.
Citation is influenced by the accessibility of the work to scientists, the readability of the manuscripts, and the clarity and accuracy of the use of nomenclature and data presentation. At the start of my term as Editor in Chief, The Plant Cell engaged four outstanding freelance science editors to copyedit and improve manuscripts postacceptance. This additional service has become recognized as enormously beneficial to the readability and quality of articles in The Plant Cell. The science editors have guaranteed that technical standards are maintained (removing the ultimate responsibility for this from coeditors). The engagement of the science editors—Jen Mach, Kathy Farquharson, Nancy Hofmann, Greg Bertoni, and, more recently, Jennifer Lockhart—has been a real bonus for The Plant Cell and has undoubtedly added significantly to the impact, readability, and citability of its content. The science editors also write many of the In Brief introductions to articles, increasing the visibility of the hottest stories in each issue.
To maintain the quality of work published in The Plant Cell, I have continued the practice promoted by my predecessor, Rich Jorgenson, of publishing articles about standards in scientific research. These are not editorials but rather consensus views from the community on what the standard level of proof or analysis should be in The Plant Cell. These are recommendations, not rules, and follow the earlier initiatives on standards in statistical analysis promoted by Rich and Rebecca Doerge in The Plant Cell. Articles like Michael Udvardi’s “Eleven Golden Rules of qRT-PCR” and Alisdair Fernie et al.’s “Recommendations for Reporting Metabolite Data” have been helpful to many and exceptionally well consulted. I only wish that I had been able to persuade the cell biologists to publish standards in subcellular localization in plants, which they have been promising for quite a while!
Part of my vision for The Plant Cell back in 2007 was to strengthen front matter such that if Open Access research content was instigated, the subscription from academic libraries across the world to the journals might be maintained to allow access to the front matter section. This meant strengthening the articles that The Plant Cell published in this section, particularly the reviews, which were rather unattractively entitled “Essays.” Nan Eckardt has worked tirelessly to expand and strengthen this section, scouting out needed reviews in plant science and commissioning sets of reviews around larger topics. These have proved popular, and once again the front matter of The Plant Cell contributes positively to its impact factor. In addition, expanding the feature on Large-Scale Biology has allowed us to publish more methodological work, which has been, and increasingly will be, essential for handling, analyzing, and interpreting large data sets. Many authors have told us that they like this feature of the journal, including the next Editor in Chief, Sabeeha Merchant.
The innovation that I brought to The Plant Cell was Teaching Tools in Plant Biology (TTPB), born originally from an idea to have a new feature that could bring the delights, excitement, and fascination of research on plants closer to the classroom. Mary Williams has taken this “half-idea” and developed it into something innovative and inspiring for educating, at many levels, the wonders of plants and how they work. What started out as a simple slide set around topics in plant biology has morphed into a set of fully functional tools, capable of being adjusted to a wide range of teaching levels. A past president of ASPB told me recently that he was faced with the challenge of teaching three hours on plant hormones. He selected 70% of his slides from the series of tools on plant hormones and was amazed at how up-to-date the content was. He formulated the topics in a general sense and sent the slide set and lecture notes to his students in advance of the lessons. He then spent the lesson time discussing the information presented with the students, directed by the teaching guides provided by Mary with each of the tools. One of the outcomes of this new feature is that we have started to have worldwide discussions about what the plant community wants and needs to promote our science. Clearly, no one-size-fits-all teaching strategy or top-down approach is appropriate. That is why Teaching Tools are presented as sets of tools that enable teachers to educate in the way that works best for their students, whether that be a flipped-classroom strategy popular in America or the traditional style widely embraced in the rest of the world.
I have heard scientific lobby organizations being encouraged to consult “Why Study Plants?” (the first of the Teaching Tools) when trying to explain the reasons that agricultural research should be supported by government funding. We are incredibly lucky to have Mary to develop Teaching Tools in Plant Biology; if anyone can advocate successfully for plant science, Mary can. Feedback from libraries suggests that they do appreciate The Plant Cell for offering something important and new through TTPB and that this feature has contributed significantly to maintaining the subscription, despite cutbacks in many library budgets.
I have encouraged the discussion of scientific issues in cases where scientists have tested hypotheses proposed in other publications and raised queries and concerns about the claims in the original publications. I believe that The Plant Cell is the appropriate forum for debate of these types of issues in the field of plant biology. All such Commentaries and Letters to the Editor are rigorously peer reviewed and must be judged to meet the high standards of The Plant Cell with respect to the level of scholarship, the level of interest to the scientific community, and the reliability of methods employed and data presented. Any author whose work is the subject of such a Commentary is offered the chance of rebuttal, and all rebuttal letters are also subject to independent peer review. Commentaries and Letters to the Editor of this type have become increasingly popular, and 19 have been published since 2011. This forum for discussion and debate in plant science is unique to The Plant Cell and provides an invaluable opportunity to correct misconceptions or errors in the literature while keeping the debate objective and scientific.
Of course, there are areas where I have not achieved what I wanted for the journal. The most significant of these has been increased Open Access for research content. I have always been in favor of reducing the delay in free online release of papers to six months (or even three months, since financial models suggest that this is the period after which access by subscription drops off) for the pragmatic reason that greater accessibility increases citations. ASPB has been unwilling to risk its subscription income by making this change and has maintained a charge for Open Access in The Plant Cell despite Real-Time Plant Physiology offering free Open Access to corresponding authors who are ASPB members. I can only hope that once ASPB is less dependent on its journals for generating income, The Plant Cell will move rapidly toward full Open Access for its research content. In the meantime, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Open Access articles published in The Plant Cell. So far, in 2014, 123 authors (43%) have chosen to make their articles Open Access compared with 2013, when 86 authors (27%) chose Open Access. This increase may reflect recent changes in RCUK’s policy for Open Access publications reporting work they have funded, changes that will also occur in the near future for work funded by the European Commission. I regret that I will need to leave the task of ensuring Open Access for all research content in The Plant Cell to my successor, Sabeeha Merchant. At least with the rollout of flat-rate charges and free color, the costs of publishing in The Plant Cell should come down appreciably in 2014–2015.
I leave The Plant Cell with regrets that I will no longer be “in charge.” I will miss the fantastic camaraderie of the editorial board meetings, the generation of new ideas for articles and features through interactions with Nan and Mary, and choosing the cover images with Susan Entwistle, Patti Lockhart, and Nan Eckardt. I will miss Annette Kessler’s continual optimism and Nancy Winchester’s exceptionally good taste in wine, but I will be pleased to have a little more time for my own research. I am confident that The Plant Cell is in very good hands for the next five years. I cannot imagine a better successor than Sabeeha Merchant, and I look forward to seeing The Plant Cell move from strength to strength under her stewardship.
