Review of activities 2019

• In the calendar year 2019 the journal Annals of Botany appeared for the 133rd year in unbroken succession. Seven issues within Volume 123 and seven within Volume 124 were published. The total number of edited pages in 2018 was 2,508 (2,703 in 2018).
• Three Special (or Focus) Issues appeared (three in 2018); these dealt with Ecology and Evolution of Plant Reproduction, Developing Sustainable Bioenergy Crops for Future Climates, and Root Traits Benefitting Crop Production in Environments with Limited Water and Nutrients’
• One example of a less exhaustive ‘Highlight Issue’ (containing smaller collections of special-topic papers) appeared in 2019, Drought (one in 2018). No ‘Botanical Briefings’ were published (none in 2018); ten ‘Review’ articles appeared (fifteen in 2018); six ‘Viewpoints’ were published (seven in 2018), four ‘Research in Context’ articles (seven in 2018), and one ‘Technical Article’ (none in 2018).

• The Plant Cuttings section was discontinued from Volume 124, Issue 5, being replaced by Commentary articles discussing selected recent articles from the journal; thirteen examples of these appeared in 2019.
  
• The total number of pages published was 10% below target (3% below target in 2018). 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 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 level of service to authors. The journal published 77 articles across 884 pages (77 and 627 in 2018) and continued to levy Article Processing Charges, with one exemption being awarded (nine in 2018). In 2019 its revenue grew 18% over that of the previous year (13% in 2018).
• A new open-access, online-only journal entitled in silico Plants appeared for the first time in 2019, dealing with all aspects of computational plant science. Oxford University Press is again the publisher. Volume 1 began in April 2019 and by the end of the year had accumulated one review paper, ten original articles and one opinion paper.
• The weblog Botany One, continued to grow in variety and prestige. The electronic newsletter The Week in Botany continues to be sent out weekly to plant scientists on a free subscription basis. The Company’s own web presence at annalsofbotanycompany.co.uk has been maintained and continues to develop 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. These two free titles together consumed £48k of expenditure in 2019. What grants and donations are now made, as such, are awarded only to activities that are directly helpful to the Company's own titles. The total value of grants awarded in 2019 was £2k (£7k in 2018).