News and perspectives for <scp><i>Annals of Applied Biology</i></scp> in 2023: Looking forward to more and more submissions

Life in general appears to be back to normal although we should bear in mind that we are never totally free of events that can disrupt human activities. What is clear for us working with Annals of Applied Biology is that during the pandemic we observed a major increase in submissions, a fact that seems to have occurred to most journals. I am glad that we can now concentrate on the issues related to editing the journal and making sure we provide our authors with an efficient editorial work for quick revisions of the submissions and publication. Still, 2022 showed a decrease in the number of submissions after several years of continuous increase. The publishing world is very dynamic with continuous changes and I want to thank the key and important support of the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB, https://www.aab.org.uk) and Wiley (https://www.Wiley.com/en-us) over the last year. Thanks are also due to our editors and reviewers who have been working extremely hard as always and making sure we keep the high standard and efficiency during the entire publication process. I believe most journals are facing issues related to finding reviewers to evaluate the manuscripts, which in many cases as observed for Annals, mean inviting 10–15 people in order to get 2–3 reports. Finally, my thanks to our authors who considered Annals as a vehicle to publish their research and ideas, and to our readers who I hope are happy with the science published in our articles, many of them made Free Access. When Metrics are concerned, Annals is performing well overall with 2.766 and 0.96, on the Journal Impact Factor™ and the Journal Citation Indicator™ (Metrics by Clarivate™), respectively. Annals has now a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.594 in SCImago Journal Rankings for Agronomy and Crop Science. The CiteScore™ (Scopus®) is up from 3.7 to 4.6 and the CiteScoreTracker 2022 is already suggesting an increase for 2023, indicating a good and steady increase over the last few years. It is important to report the news that Wiley has become a San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) signatory. In brief, the overarching goal of DORA is to shift emphasis away from journal-based metrics and assessment, towards article-level metrics and individual author contribution. As indicated by Wiley, over 2023 the editors of journals published by Wiley will be hearing more about the tangible, visible actions that Wiley plans to take as we all move forward with the adoption of DORA principles. In discussions with Annals editors and previously commented (Azevedo, 2022), we are trying to gain more visibility by using other metrics with even more involvement of the editors on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on, and their own personal websites, which is good for the journal, but even more to the authors by making their work more visible to other audiences. We also count on the authors to share their publications in all possible platforms by sharing the link provided by Annals. One piece of key information I have to give you is that Wiley has designed a new submission platform for Wiley journals. The new Research Exchange (ReX) submission platform, which will replace the current one, has been tested and migration is under way. Since this editorial is being written in mid-November 2022, validation has already been completed for Annals, therefore, ReX should be available in weeks for Annals authors. Based on our experience testing ReX and working with the Wiley team over the last months, the new platform looks pretty nice and in my opinion, makes the submission process much better, easier and quicker. Well done Wiley and our thanks to Andreas Petersen and Madalina Poienaru (Wiley). Wiley has also shared with us the new Decision Term Harmonization (DTH) initiative. In brief, the project is going to address several gaps in Wiley's current editorial office systems, which will make the decision process smoother for editors and authors, enabling Wiley to gather and provide better data, and implement more checks and balances to prevent truly unpublishable papers from perpetuating. I would also like to share with you the nice experience I and some of our editors are having attending the webinars on science publishing/editing (Wiley webinars for Editors; Wiley Editor News; from Wiley Editor Resources), offered by Wiley. This has been very good for our work as editors and for the journal. I recommend these seminars to anyone involved in publishing and editing science. The Senior Editors (SEs) of Annals have revised the Scope of the journal and changed it to: “Annals of Applied Biology publishes novel and rigorous research on all aspects of agricultural production. Our goal is to share groundbreaking science to a wide international audience, advancing our understanding of crop production, crop protection, animal health and welfare, and their impact on the environment. We especially welcome hypothesis-driven research using either theoretical or experimental approaches to answer key questions of general interest to our broad readership. The journal covers, among the others, the fields of: Agronomy, Agroecology, Animal health and welfare, Biodiversity including the interaction with both wildlife and farmland animals, Biotechnology, Forestry, Global changes, Plant breeding and genetics, Plant-microbe and plant-insect interactions, Plant physiology, Plant protection, Postharvest biology, Soil science, Weed biology”. I must further remind you that Annals is a hybrid journal, in which you have the option of open access or the subscription publication. We continued with our new series of special Editorials, named “Interviews” introduced in Annals of Applied Biology in 2020 (Azevedo & Millman, 2020). In 2021, we published an Interview with Carol Millman, former Executive Officer, AAB (Azevedo, 2021), and in 2022 an Interview with Prof. Nigel G. Halford, who is a group leader in plant sciences at Rothamsted Research, UK, and is currently the Honorary Treasurer of the AAB, was published (Azevedo & Haslam, 2022). We are currently working on two more “Interviews” for 2023. Annals carries on with the special sections on Plant Phenological Growth Stages and Description of Plant Viruses (DPV). I would like to invite you to visit the DPV website (https://dpvweb.net/), which provides a central source of information about viruses, viroids and satellites of plants, fungi and protozoa, with some additional data on animal viruses and phages with RNA or ssDNA genomes. I am happy to let you know that in this issue of Annals we are publishing a paper (Open Access) on DPV: “Tomato chlorosis virus, a promiscuous virus with multiple host plants and whitefly vectors” authored by Elvira Fiallo-Olivé and Jesús Navas-Castillo (https://doi.org/10.1111/aab.12809; Fiallo-Olivé & Navas-Castillo, 2023). An initiative by the AAB was to create the “Annals of Applied Biology First Author Profile”. Annals and the AAB ask first authors from articles published in Annals to provide some background to themselves and the research they have published. These can be found at https://www.aab.org.uk/annals-first-author-profiles/ on the AAB website. We have had some changes in the editorial board in 2022. We welcome the following new colleagues to the Board of Editors from 2022: Antonio A. F. Garcia, Gabriel R. A. Margarido, Jose A. Gutierrez-Barranquero, Ajay K. Tiwari and Bartlomiej J. Troczka. New editors for the Advances in Virology Special Issue: Charlotte Nellist and Trisna Tungadi. We are counting on your expertise and commitment to the journal. Our thanks are also due to the editors who resigned from the board in 2022: Vasilis Fotopoulos, Ted Evans, Marcin Kozak, Kyle Wickings and Tom Wilkinson. We truly appreciate your contribution over the years. A good experience we have had is the virtual subject area meetings with members of the editorial board. The feedback from the editors has been great and more importantly, we have had the opportunity to talk to them about the journal and science in general, and get to know them a bit better. In July 2022, we also had a hybrid Senior Editor's meeting (in London). It was really good the feeling of having at least some of the editors in person and we hope to have the next one in 2023 with the full team together in person. We were also very happy to have Andreas Petersen from Wiley participating in the meeting. Andreas shared with the SEs a lot of information and we managed to discuss the journal with him. We hope to continue having Andreas in our meetings apart from the catch-up regular meetings I and Carol Millman have with him four times per year. I invite you to follow us on social media. Check our Facebook® page, Twitter (Twitter accounts: @Annapplbiol, @AABiologists), and so on, and also those of our editors and collaborators. We can create a nice network for the dissemination of research published in Annals, by our editors, authors, readers any collaborators as well. Your feedback is very important to us. My thanks to Carol Millman, our Editorial Officer, for her efficiency and guidance. My special thanks to Prof. Roy Kennedy, who completed his term as the AAB Publications Officer. Roy has given the journal and the editors full support for many years, and I particularly felt totally supported during the transition period to become Editor-in-Chief of Annals. The entire process was very easy and Roy was readily available to discuss the strategies and ideas I had for the journal. I very much appreciate working with you Roy, and wish you the very best. Finally, I would like to welcome Prof. Martin Parry (Lancaster University), elected as the new AAB Publications Officer from 2023, and wish him a prolific term. Martin has a lot of experience and was on the board of editors of Annals for many years, acting as Senior Editor and Editor-in-Chief. I am looking forward to working together with Martin again. I joined the board of editors back in 2006 when Prof. Peter Lea (Lancaster University) invited me to be an Associated Editor, and on the following year Martin invited me to be a Senior Editor. Furthermore, Martin also invited me to join him on the creation of a new journal, Food and Energy Security, back in 2012. I wish you all the best for 2023 and keep on checking Annals publications and visit our website and social media pages for more news and updates, and also the AAB website.