New Trials of Plant and Cell Physiology in 2005

The number of manuscripts submitted to PCP in 2004 was 523 (I am sorry that 526, which appeared in the Editorial of the 2005 February issue, was wrong), which is the greatest number so far (Table 1). This year, the number of manuscripts submitted by the end of May exceeded that of last year. The increase in submitted manuscripts is due mainly to increased submissions from overseas (Table 1), including China, the USA, Germany, Korea, India, Taiwan, Canada, Australia, Spain, Italy and France. The decrease in the acceptance rate of manuscripts since 2002 is remarkable (Table 1), and it may reach about 40% this year. The Editors are discussing the introduction of ‘decline but encourage resubmission’ instead of ‘review after revision’. This will be introduced later this year (see below). As indicated in the February issue, the impact factor of PCP increased steadily from 2.259 in 1999 to 3.159 in 2003. Very recently, ISI Web published the 2004 impact factors, in which that of PCP was 3.258, indicating that our journal is still developing. We also have another important figure for evaluation of journals, i.e. online access. Fig. 1 shows the numbers of times that online access was used for HTML, Abstract and PDF files. The numbers for all the items increased around 3–4 times more during the last 2.5 years. As regards online access, a list of the top 10 most frequently visited articles and the access data will be e-mailed to the corresponding authors of the top 10 articles each month. The same data will also be provided on the JSPP homepage. Here I describe Publish Ahead of Print (PAP) again, which was introduced in January this year. PAP services will enable a paper to be online within an average of 7 days after acceptance. The authors simply need to submit their paper, and their accepted paper will appear as advance access articles at our online journal site and can even be cited. I describe here one of the fastest cases. A paper submitted to PCP as a Rapid Paper on February 23, 2005 was accepted on March 10, and appeared online on March 13. It took only 18 days from submission to its appearance online, which is one of the fastest publication times among various journals. I believe that such rapid publication will help overcome any strong competition. However, people need to be cautious about PAP. A paper that appears in PAP may not be consistent with the final form of the paper, which will be published in an issue after copyediting and proofreading. Both versions will be identified by a unique tag called the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) such as doi:10.1093/pcp/pci999. When citing an Advance Access article, please cite the DOI number so the readers will be directed to the final version of the article. For PAP, please visit the Plant and Cell Physiology Advance Access site on the top page of the JSPP homepage. In the 2005 January issue, PCP published five review articles on rice in celebration of the decoding of the entire rice genome sequence in December 2004. This was intended to provide common terminology to explain traits and developmental stages, and to give information about the current situation of rice resources such as mutant libraries. To allow a wider group of plant scientists to read them or to use them as a textbook of monocots, we published the five review articles as a booklet, where four new beautiful plates were added containing various tissues in stems, leaves, roots and spikelets. You will be able to buy this from Oxford University Press (http://www.oupjapan.co.jp/journals/files/RG_order.pdf). We adopted four categories for judgement of papers submitted to PCP, ‘accept without revision’, ‘accept after minor revision’, ‘review after revision’ and ‘decline’. From October 1, 2005, we will substitute ‘decline, but encourage resubmission’ for ‘review after revision’. We are aiming at rapid publication of papers, but the manuscripts that were categorized as ‘review after revision’ sometimes needed a long time to be revised, resulting in late publication. In principle, we required the authors to send back the revised manuscript within 2 months when the manuscript was judged as ‘review after revision’. However, 2 months are often insufficient for polishing the manuscript. The category ‘decline, but encourage resubmission’ will be used for manuscripts that contain high originality and/or novelty but need polishing further to complete them. High quality manuscripts that need extra data will be judged in this category. Each cover of PCP will have an illustration selected from one of the articles published in that issue. Authors are welcome to submit a color photograph or illustration for a cover photograph to the Administration Office Center. The image will then be forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief for consideration. If your photograph is selected, you will be contacted by the Editor-in-Chief or the Production Manager. Reprints with the cover photograph will be provided for the authors whose picture or illustration is selected as the cover of a PCP issue. If you have any ideas to develop PCP further as an attractive international scientific journal, I would be glad to hear from you. Fig. 1 Changes in the number of incidences of online access per month. Current data on submission and results of reviewing a As of May 31, 2005. b Figures in parenthese show the number of overseas submissions. Current data on submission and results of reviewing a As of May 31, 2005. b Figures in parenthese show the number of overseas submissions.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.