Plant Direct (plantdirectjournal.org), a new journal from Wiley and the societies behind Plant Physiology, The Plant Journal, and The Plant Cell. Although there is a crowded landscape of journals to choose from, we believe that Plant Direct fills an unserved role for the plant community. We seek to be the sound science plant journal for the community of ASPB members, Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) members, and the authors who publish in our society journals. By “sound science,” Plantdirect 主编在介绍 plant direct植物期刊说道。该杂志有以下几个亮点值得推崇！
1 strong promotion of preprint posting at submission (预印本发布)
2 referred reviews from Plant Physiology, The Plant Cell, and The Plant Journal—that is, manuscripts will be easily transferred for consideration along with any accompanying reviewer reports;
3 publication of anonymous reviewer reports upon acceptance.
从上述特点可以看出，Plant direct 提交预印本可以加快出版过程通过减少或消除步骤导致延误，其次，允许编辑受益于先前的评论和可以完全消除需要发送稿件审查,从而期刊Reviewer工作量，此外同行评论的公开发表，将确保文章审查的流程的完整性和透明度。
Plant Direct is now fully up and running and accepting manuscripts and publishing papers. We are very excited to see the great science that has been submitted. But many have asked me what our statement "We seek to be the sound science plant journal for the community of ASPB members, SEB members, and the authors who publish in our society journals" indicates about our scope—in terms of both subjects and types of papers. In this editorial, I will attempt to answer those questions in some detail.
We are hoping to fill a niche for the entire plant science community—a place for everyone to publish all of their sound science. The inaugural Editorial for Plant Direct provides more details about our mission as a community journal. The scope of Plant Direct includes all of the original research that you might submit to Plant Physiology, The Plant Cell, or The Plant Journal—we simply apply different review criteria and make judgments on sound science rather than impact or novelty. In addition, we are also interested in the following types of research:
Negative results: Do you have a research project that, while well executed, did not produce a significant result around which to frame your manuscript? For example, did you identify a set of genes—a gene family, candidates from quantitative genetics or transcript profiling experiments, and screen mutants of the genes for a given phenotype—but none were different from wild type? Those results still have value to our community, and we would be happy to publish them. You just have to convince your reviewers that you conducted the experiments rigorously and to the technical standards of the community.
Replication Experiments: Have you intentionally, or unintentionally, repeated an experiment that other researchers have already published? Just like with negative results, knowing that these results are or are not replicable has value to the community.
Methods, software tools, and datasets: These represent incredibly important components of any research project, and many times it can be useful to publish them quickly as a discreet, citable unit. Plant Direct is happy to provide a venue for our community to rapidly disseminate these contributions.
Functionally, the subject matter scope is defined by the members of our editorial board: An editor has to make an affirmative decision to handle a manuscript, so they need to feel that its subject matter is close enough to their expertise for them to evaluate. The effective scope will expand as our board grows. To give you a feel for the current board, our editors selected keywords representing their expertise. You can find a full listing of the keywords and associated editors here, and the figures represent the breadth of the terms they used. However, authors should not consider these lists to strictly define our scope; we are happy to consider manuscripts on subjects related to our expertise—for example, work on plant species that are not listed.
I hope that this editorial has answered your questions about whether Plant Direct is the right place for your next manuscript. But if you still have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at PlantDirect@wiley.com.
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资料来源：https://blog.aspb.org/2017/03/14/introducing-plant-direct/
March 14, 2017 by Ivan Baxter
As the editor-in-chief, I am excited to introduce Plant Direct (plantdirectjournal.org), a new journal from Wiley and the societies behind Plant Physiology, The Plant Journal, and The Plant Cell. Although there is a crowded landscape of journals to choose from, we believe that Plant Direct fills an unserved role for the plant community. We seek to be the sound science plant journal for the community of ASPB members, Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) members, and the authors who publish in our society journals. By “sound science,” we mean that instead of trying to determine the novelty or impact of a paper, we will judge manuscripts based on whether the experiments and analysis are performed to an acceptable technical standard and described in adequate detail in standard English, how well the conclusions are supported by the data, and whether the manuscript and contents meet all ethical and research integrity standards (as the person who will have to deal with it if it occurs, can we please not violate the last one, pretty please?).
Plant Direct is a society journal, and we think the service-to-community part of our mission statement is incredibly important. Publishing has changed dramatically over the past two decades, and many of the services that journals have provided are no longer essential. The single most important service that journals provide now is managing the peer review process. But the effort of peer review at a sound science journal is done entirely by the community; active scientists are both the editors and reviewers (helped out by the great management staff at Wiley). When the community is doing the work, the community should reap the benefits. Our societies support our community, and the two sponsoring societies, ASPB and SEB, will be able to use the revenues from this journal to support their important work in education, outreach, networking, and the advancement of plant science.
Starting a new journal also allowed us to look at the way we run our journals with a fresh eye. The past 20 years have seen a wide variety of innovations in scientific publishing, including journals moving online and the proliferation of open access journals. Nonetheless, for many researchers the publishing process continues to be slow, frustrating, and wasteful of authors’ and reviewers’ time. Manuscripts pass through multiple stages of review and revision, sometimes spanning multiple journals, each using new reviewers. Although this process improves many papers, it also greatly delays when the science becomes available to the scientific community. There are three features of Plant Direct that will improve the speed, efficiency, and openness of the publication process:
strong promotion of preprint posting at submission;
referred reviews from Plant Physiology, The Plant Cell, and The Plant Journal—that is, manuscripts will be easily transferred for consideration along with any accompanying reviewer reports; and
publication of anonymous reviewer reports upon acceptance.
These features will speed scientific communication in two ways. The preprint is visible to the scientific community immediately, although readers must judge for themselves the work’s technical merit. This visibility has major benefits for authors, especially junior scientists applying for fellowships, grants, and jobs, by showing their great science to the world. It also benefits readers who are not in the author’s close-knit network and thus may not be able to put the author’s hard work to use to move their field forward until it is published as a peer-reviewed article. We think that preprints offer such a strong benefit to the community that we will give you a discount on your publication charges if your manuscript is posted on a preprint server at the time of submission to Plant Direct.
The other features of Plant Direct speed the publication process by reducing or eliminating steps that contribute to delays. Allowing transfer of manuscripts from referring journals, or from the bioRxiv preprint server, will save authors the hassle of entering manuscript metadata multiple times. Referred reviews from participating journals allow the editor to benefit from previous reviews and may remove altogether the need to send the manuscript out for review, thereby reducing reviewer workload. The publication of reviewer comments will make the process more open and help to ensure the integrity and transparency of the review process.
We are also going to be working with our author, reviewer, and editor community to identify and implement new ways to reduce the bottlenecks in the publication process. We will host a series of discussions in spring/summer 2017, both online (at Plantae.org) and at scientific meetings, to brainstorm new ideas and gauge the support for these ideas and ideas already in circulation. Please let us know your thoughts on these efforts as well as how we can make the publishing process better. We are also interested in ideas on how to incorporate mentorship and training of postdoctorals and graduate students into the publishing process.
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