Editorial

When the journals of the German and Dutch Botanical Societies merged in PLANT BIOLOGY the level of ambition was high. While more and more specialised journals fill specific niches in the botanical research landscape, PLANT BIOLOGY serves as a platform for papers of more general interest and papers that take a multidisciplinary approach. In the forthcoming sixth volume a number of changes will become effective that we expect to lead to a further increase in the impact of our journal.

However, first this editorial is a farewell to Rens Voesenek after he has served as Editor-in-Chief from the conception of PLANT BIOLOGY with his characteristic and inspiring enthusiasm. The significant number of review articles that appear in the issues of PLANT BIOLOGY are just one of the innovations he brought to the journal, an innovation that has now led to the appointment of a dedicated Review Editor

We are very glad that John Raven has agreed to act as our Review Editor. With his incredibly wide and encyclopaedic knowledge of plant biology he is the ideal person to choose the right moment for an overview, when a ‘hot’ issue can be evaluated with some hindsight, when the different opinions can compared and a reconciliation of the data is appropriate. He will approach authors with an invitation to write a review and he will handle the submitted review articles. We welcome John wholeheartedly to our team.

Another change is the introduction of a fully electronic submission and reviewing procedure. Authors are asked to submit their manuscripts by e-mail as a pdf file. The electronic handling of manuscripts will be more convenient and, more importantly, a lot faster. This first step towards an electronic system will be followed by the introduction of an on-line submission and reviewing system in the course of 2004. The editors of PLANT BIOLOGY aim at a review procedure that will not take longer than 3 weeks for full papers and not longer than 10 days for short publications. In the new procedure a first check on the manuscript will be performed by the Editors-in-Chief in Freiburg and in Haren. This means that it is no longer possible to send the manuscripts directly to the former Section Editors (now Editorial Board members), but only to the Editors-in-Chief.

The successor of Prof. Rens Voesenek will be Prof. Theo Elzenga from the Department of Ecophysiology of Plants at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Prof. Elzenga has served for the past two years as section editor in the Physiology and Molecular Biology and Proteomics section and as co-editor. In these last two years he has been involved in the plans for the changes in the reviewing procedure and thus is keenly aware of the fine details of the job at hand. We wish him success in his new position.

Finally, the Section Editor system will be replaced by an Editorial Board system. As you can see from the names listed in this issue of PLANT BIOLOGY a large number of Section Editors will continue to serve PLANT BIOLOGY, now on the Editorial Board. But a number of other highly reputed scientists have been added to further improve competent handling of submitted manuscripts. We thank the former Section Editors and the new members of the Editorial Board for their willingness to serve PLANT BIOLOGY during the next years.

Prof. Dr. H. Rennenberg

Editor-in-Chief