Despite a stressful period with the pandemic, publication is going strong: News about Annals of Applied Biology

Abstract

It has been 2 years since this challenging period due to the pandemic started. The disruption caused by COVID-19 has probably been much stronger than any of us could have expected. The year 2021 was not easy despite some clear improvement in the overall condition around the world, mainly thanks to the tremendous work of the scientific community and companies in producing a range of vaccines quickly and the use of very simple and efficient protective measures such as wearing face masks indoors and outdoors, and social distancing.I want to start this editorial with a big thanks to the Association of Applied Biology (AAB: https://www.aab.org.uk) and Wiley (https:// www.wiley.com/en-us) for their support over the last 2 years. They did a tremendous job keeping everything going well and with full and continuous support. To our editors and reviewers who also did not drop the ball and managed to keep the high standard and efficiency of the entire publishing process. To our authors and all those who considered Annals as a vehicle to publish their research and ideas. Thanks also to you, our readers, who we hope are happy with the information we are publishing and are using it in your research and activities. It was another difficult year, but I believe we all did pretty well.Research continued to be affected in 2021, but the overall perception is that we all managed to do a bit better than in 2020. Many of us still had to do most of the work from home, but it has been amazing how the new communication alternatives made possible by tools such as Meet, Teams, Zoom, among others, so rapidly created a new positive and reliable scenario for online conferences, teaching, webinars and so on. Some hybrid events are already taking place, and slowly scientific activities are getting back to near normal.The year 2021 was also the year we lost a friend and extraordinary colleague, Prof. Simon Leather (Figure 1), who has been on the board of Annals since 2005 as a Senior Editor, and between 2015 and 2020 as the Editor-in-Chief. Simon passed away in September. It was

Interview with Prof. Evgenios Agathokleous, School of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST), China

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Q: I have published an Editorial in the July issue of 2023 (Azevedo, 2023 ) discussing the cost of publication, the huge increase in the number of journals, unfortunately thousands of them predatory, the difficult life of reviewers who have a key fundamental job and are not paid for it, and also the hard time editors have had in recent years in finding reviewers to help them and the journal evaluating the submissions. What are your views about such issues?

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What's up for Annals of Applied Biology in 2024

“…It seems that the trend in submission observed in the last 2 years is slowly getting to a new level. After a continuous steady increase in submissions until 2021 (Azevedo, 2022) when a major jump was observed, 2022 and 2023, showed reductions. Still, the number of published papers did not change and we have maintained the same numbers over the years.…”

“…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. In an editorial I wrote in July 2023 (Azevedo, 2023), I commented about an issue that is certainly making the life of editors and authors difficult: finding reviewers to evaluate the manuscripts. Conversations with fellow editors clearly showed that many of us are facing the same problem.…”

News and perspectives for Annals of Applied Biology in 2023: Looking forward to more and more submissions

“…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 .…”