Open Access in Annals of Botany – low costs allowing more pages

The information here is no longer current at 1/1/2019. Annals of Botany offers Open Access with competitive Article Processing Charges (APCs) given in our instructions.

I’m delighted to say that we have reduced the Annals of Botany Open Access charges to £1000 GBP/ $1615 USD/ €1160 EURO for all papers. Open Access papers are freely accessible to everybody over the web, and all rights for reuse, republication and dissemination lie with the authors. Our discussions suggest that the high charges are a major limitation to wider uptake of open access across the whole plant research community, and this 40% reduction makes our charges substantially lower than those of all the major on-line/open-access-only subject journals. We have the additional advantages that our open-access papers are distributed not just on-line but in the printed journal. Like all our authors, the open access authors have no charges for full-colour in their papers and receive free reprints. For authors from low-income developing countries, we completely waive the open access charge so these authors can distribute their papers more widely. Full details are given at  http://www.oxfordjournals.org/annbot/oxfordopen/article . Our Annals of Botany subscription costs will be reduced in line with the open-access content in the journal, so this will allow us to increase the number of papers we publish without increasing the subscription. Authors make a decision about open-access after acceptance of their manuscript so editorial processes are not changed.

We maintain our other reader- and author-friendly policies for all our contributors, including no page charges for authors, authors retaining copyright on all their work, free access to many review articles, increasing amounts of editorial material including ContentSnapshots, Plant Cuttings, and book reviews, wide free distribution of Special Issues, and of course distribution and circulation through AoBBlog.com and press releases for papers of wider public interest. We are grateful to the not-for-profit charity Annals of Botany (owner of the journal) for agreeing to subsidize the costs of the open access papers, in line with their mission for promotion and dissemination of botanical sciences.

We hope and expect that the more even mix of open access and subscription access papers will make us even more attractive for publication of the best novel and substantial plant science, a feature that makes Annals of Botany among the leading broad-spectrum botanical Journals. As Chief Editor, I am very happy that we will be able to offer the best of open-access to those authors with appropriate grants or other funding, while giving other authors from around the world the opportunity to publish without any charges.