AoB Blog » Open Access Plant Science – Every Week of the Year

"This week is Open Acess Week, the annual event celebrating the global movement towards Open Access (OA) to research and scholarship. Here at AoB Blog we try to do our bit to make current research in plant science accessible and interesting to a wide audience, but the Annals of Botany Company goes way beyond that in publishing AoB PLANTS, an online internationally peer reviewed open-access journal publishing high quality papers on all aspects of plant biology – that are free for anyone to read, anywhere in the world. It costs a surprising amount of money to produce a high quality research journal, but Annals of Botany keeps publication charges lower than most similar journals, and 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 of the journal. So why does any of this matter? Because although developing countries, where the twin threats of climate change and food security are likely to have the greatest adverse effects, spend a disproportionately high amount of money on plant science research, funding is still severely limited. And without access to the best and most recent discoveries in plant science, the future for developing countries looks bleak. You can afford to worry about medical research once you have enough food to eat...."