About Plant Methods

What is Plant Methods?

Plant Methods is an Open Access, peer-reviewed online journal that will encompass all aspects of technological innovation in the plant sciences.

There is no doubt that we have entered an exciting new era in plant biology. The completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence, and the rapid progress being made in other plant genomics projects are providing unparalleled opportunities for progress in all areas of plant science. Nevertheless, enormous challenges lie ahead if we are to understand the function of every gene in the genome, and how the individual parts work together to make the whole organism. Achieving these goals will require an unprecedented collaborative effort, combining high-throughput, system-wide technologies with more focused approaches that integrate traditional disciplines such as cell biology, biochemistry and molecular genetics.

Technological innovation is probably the most important catalyst for progress in any scientific discipline. Yet to date there has been no plant journal specialising on the development and application of new techniques. The result is that technical creativity has not being given the high-profile platform it needs and deserves. Plant Methods aims to redress the balance by promoting and rapidly disseminating technological advances in plant biology. The goals of the journal will be to stimulate the development and adoption of new and improved techniques and research tools and, where appropriate, to promote consistency of methodologies for better integration of data from different laboratories.

Content overview

Plant Methods considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research that is principally based on the application of a new experimental method or protocol. The method must be described in detail and must be either completely new or must offer a significant advance on what is currently available.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Book reviews: short summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of a book. They should evaluate its overall usefulness to the intended audience.
• Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders.
• Database articles: describe a new database or a substantial improvement of an existing database.
• Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method.
• Software articles: describe the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file.

Peer review policies

Manuscripts will be assigned to a Monitoring Editor, who will appoint at least two referees. On receipt of their reports the Monitoring Editor will make a recommendation to accept, to accept with minor revisions, to request major revisions and resubmission, or to reject. No manuscript will be rejected without being assessed by a member of the Editorial Board and one other expert.

Edited by Brian G Forde, Plant Methods is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Plant Methods

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central, Thomson Reuters (ISI), Agricola, CAS, CABI and Embase.

Articles in Plant Methods should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Plant Methods 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Plant Methods does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Plant Methods, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Plant Methods using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Plant Methods is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is open access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Plant Methods however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Plant Methods's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Plant Methods will be available.

Plant Methods is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.