Review of activities 2017

• In the calendar year 2017 the Annals of Botany appeared for the 131st year in unbroken succession. Eight issues within Volume 119 and six within Volume 120 were published. The total number of edited pages in 2017 was 2360 (2601 in 2016).
• Four Special Issues appeared (two in 2016); these were on ‘Endemism Hotspots', ‘Plant Immunity’, ‘Polyploidy in Ecology and Evolution’ and 'Morphology and Adaptation'. No examples of the less exhaustive ‘Highlight Issues’ (containing smaller collections of special-topic papers) appeared in 2017 (one in 2016). One ‘Botanical Briefing’ was published (one in 2016); sixteen ‘Review’ articles appeared (sixteen in 2016); three ‘Viewpoints’ were published (seven in 2016) and three ‘Research in Context’ articles (three in 2016).

• The total number of pages published was 16% below target (7% below target in 2016). The practice of including a different full-colour illustration on the outside cover each month was continued, together with a full-colour ContentSnapshot preview of every article. The Plant Cuttings section was continued, being a 3-4 page, full-colour feature reporting a selection of plant-based news from the world’s media. The publication of the journal remained in the hands of Oxford University Press.
• AoB PLANTS, also with  Oxford University Press, maintained its high quality of production and service to authors. Despite the journal continuing to levy Article Processing Charges, its Impact Factor rose further to 2.24.

  

• The weblog AoB Blog, now renamed Botany One, continued to grow in prestige and is now rated independently as the very top weblog in plant science world-wide. In 2017, the Company also started a lively electronic newsletter, The Week in Botany. TWIB is sent out weekly to plant scientists on a free subscription basis. The Company’s own web presence at annalsofbotanycompany.com has been maintained and developed further.
• Some grants and donations were distributed in support of individual activities within botanical science, but the Company’s view has increasingly been that its support for freely-distributed products such as Botany One and TWIB offers greater and more general benefit to plant science than does the awarding of single grants. Such awards, therefore, are now made only to those activities that are directly helpful to the Company's own titles.