Anniversaries provide opportunities for reflection, and so, after a year at the helm of Plant Physiology, it seems timely to look back at the changes and innovations that have been made to our journal during the past year, and to look forward to our aspirations for the coming year.

Although in some ways it is too soon to know the effects of the past year's innovations on our journal, several indicators suggest that we are on the right track. Institutional subscriptions at 2000 year-end were up 7% from 1999 and there has been a gratifying growth in the number of research papers submitted.

Among the major innovations of the past year was the publication of three special issues. The first of these (December 2000), a celebration of the completion of the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, marked the first time that the number of people perusing Plant Physiology on the Internet surpassed the high standard set by our precocious younger sister, The Plant Cell. Even if this is in part due to the success of the publicity and promotion that surrounded this issue, it is still exciting to see that the first special issue was successful in introducing our journal to an even wider audience. We had even higher interest for our 75th Anniversary Issue, published in January 2001. The highlight of this special issue was the 42 invited commentaries summarizing conceptual breakthroughs during the last quarter century in various areas of plant biology. The conceptual breakthrough articles will be published as a separate book that will be made available at our 75th Anniversary Symposium on Plant Biology 2001 to be held in Providence, Rhode Island. Our third special issue, put together by two Associate Editors, Susan Wessler and Vicki Chandler, and published in March 2001, was devoted entirely to the grasses, specifically to their importance as a collective model genetic system alongside Arabidopsis. Responses to these special issues have been so positive that we plan to publish an Arabidopsis special issue and a Grass special issue annually. An Arabidopsis special issue will be published in June 2001 and a Grass special issue will be published in December 2002.

In January, the Journal cover debuted a new look, but it is the new features inside the cover that are most important to Plant Physiology's readers. On the Inside, a column written monthly by our staff writer Peter Minorsky, capsulizes the essence of half a dozen or so articles that exemplify the scope and quality of content found in each issue. Peter also writes The Hot and Classic, a column that highlights selected major plant biology publications of the past and present. Soon, Peter plans to introduce News from the Archives, a column that will highlight interesting papers that have fallen into near oblivion. With the advent of molecular biology and genetic engineering, plant biology has graduated from the cloistered walls of academia to the global spotlight. Other new front-of-the-journal subjects such as Breakthrough Technologies, Genome Analysis, and Editor's Choice contributions serve as creative outlets for scientists to address a variety of issues coming into prominence as a result of plant biology's new importance. The GMO-related Editor's Choice articles published over the last few months will be collected in a separate booklet to be made available at the 75th Anniversary Symposium in Rhode Island. Soon, with Willi Gruissem's help, I plan to start a new series of Editor's Choice articles devoted to topics of interest to young readers in our profession. We have asked many peoplesome still actively working and some well-known retired plant biologiststo share their differing career experiences and thoughts on what has kept them engaged and excited in science. We thought it very worthwhile for people new to our field to know about those people who helped shape plant biology. Thanks largely to the efforts of Lauren Ransome, Plant Physiology has been successful in advertising our current and forthcoming articles and keeping our readers informed about the many exciting articles.

In response to impressions, real or imagined, that submissions to Plant Physiology took too long to publish, new internal procedures have been established to reduce turnaround time from submission to first decision from 6 to 4 weeks. To shorten production time for acceptance for publication, proofs of articles are now sent electronically to authors and in April we began publishing individual articles on-line ahead of print. In June 2001, we will be introducing on-line submission and review. We anticipate that this will make it easier to submit papers as well as expedite submitted manuscripts for evaluation by the Board and reviewers, thereby reducing overall turnaround time for submission to publication dramatically. Several on-line enhancements have been made to the on-line journal. Readers are now able to submit electronic letters to the editor with comments about individual articles directly on-line. You will see this option when you open full text of an article in the right-hand dialog box that appears with every article. The Journal is now a participant in CrossRef, an initiative designed to facilitate citation linking to journals outside the HighWire Press family. And finally, Plant Physiology is participating in PubMed Central (PMC), a Web-based archive of journal literature for all of the life sciences developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. With PMC, the National Center for Biotechnology Information is taking the lead in preserving and maintaining open access to the literature in electronic form, just as the U.S. National Library of Medicine has done for decades with the printed biomedical literature. PMC aims to fill the role of world-class library in the digital age. Plant Physiology fully supports this endeavor and is releasing back content to PMC with a 12-month delay in conjunction with the release of back issues on the HighWire site. We hope to shorten this delay as the reality of the impact on subscriptions becomes clear.

Our main objective is to publish innovative science of the highest quality. In our new Instructions to Authors, we state that work reported in Plant Physiology should be vigorously executed, provide new information, and move the field to the next level. Our journal will maintain its broad scope, but we are determined that the work we publish feature cutting edge research. The editors feel that on average the papers published in Plant Physiology are a bit too lengthy for maximum impact. While Plant Physiology must remain committed to publishing complete data in a format that is large enough to see easily (at least in the print version), text length will be subjected to more stringent control, with particular emphasis on ensuring that "Discussions" explore but do not repeat "Results."

It has been a year since the new, international Board took over the journal, and their hard work, ideas, and feedbackboth positive and negativehave been most useful. Together with the superb and highly professional efforts of our editorial staff (led by Melissa Junior, with the help of Lauren Ransome, Kim Davis, and Stephanie Butto) and our very talented science writer, Peter Minorsky, we are succeeding in making a good journal even better!

Finally, I wish to sing praise for the unsung heroes and heroines of the Plant Physiology familyour reviewers. Their expertise, promptness, and thoughtful criticisms have always been a great source of pride and amazement to me. Think of all the time each of us has saved because these individuals have so generously used their vast experience and knowledge to select only the most rigorous of scientific papers for publication in Plant Physiology. Think also of the valuable advice they have provided for our submissions that fell short. All of us owe these unrecognized and unpaid guardians of quality an immense debt of gratitude.