New plant journal

It just had to happen, but we didn’t know it would take nearly 150 years to come to fruition. And fruition is an apt word because the creation of a new botanical journal has recently been announced by the publishers behind Nature, the world’s premier general science journal. Imaginatively entitled Nature Plants, this new organ is due to be officially published in January 2015 but already has interweb presence with a blog and can be ‘followed’ on such social media as Facebook and Twitter. Its aim is to provide a fully rounded picture of the most accomplished and significant advances in the plant sciences, and will cover ‘all aspects of plants be it their evolution, development or metabolism, their interactions with the environment, or their societal significance’. Furthermore, along with original research, Nature Plants will also deliver ‘Commentaries, Reviews, News and Views’ from across the full range of disciplines concerned with the plant sciences (i.e. a bit like the Annals of Botany…). However, with topics covered in the journal including (deep breath) ‘agronomy, genomics, biochemistry, metabolism, biofuels, metabolomics, biophysics, molecular biology, cell biology, photosynthesis, defence physiology, development, plant–microbe interactions, disease resistance, proteomics ecology, secondary metabolism, economics, sociology, evolution, symbiosis, food security, systems biology, forestry and water use’, I do hope they leave something for other – more established – botanical journals, such as the Annals of Botany!

[Have others heard that the original Nature – in keeping with its soon-to-be somewhat impoverished science coverage – is being retitled Nature Cosmology, Palaentology and Non-botany? Whilst we wish this new venture well, it will be interesting to see if anybody publishes in the new journal because, and despite the undoubted cachet and kudos associated with the word Nature in the article’s citation, it won’t have an Impact Factor (IF) for a few years. Now, who wants to risk having publications on their CV in journals with no IF with potential damage to promotion prospects and career advancement (not that IFs should be used for such purposes – see e.g. EASE statement on inappropriate use of Impact Factors? Just saying. – Ed.]