It's easy--

iPhone or Ipod Touch: Go to the journal site, touch the arrow at the bottom of your screen, and then select the "Add to Home Screen" option/.

Android: Go to the journal site, touch a blank part of your screen and hold to bookmark the site, and then create a shortcut to the bookmark.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) is delighted to welcome Patti Lockhart as its new managing editor. Patti will oversee the daily operations of peer review and production for the Society's two premier plant science journals: Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell.  READ MORE

A study published in The Plant Cell furthers our understanding of lignin formation in the model plant Arabidopsis. Two laccase genes are shown to play a major role in lignin deposition.  Read More

ASPB Journals Migrate to HighWire H2O

We have a new look…and much more! On March 9, 2011, ASPB's premier plant biology journals Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell completed their migration to HighWire Press's new electronic publishing platform, H2O. HighWire, the online hosting platform for more than 1,000 scholarly journals, has rebuilt its platform from the bottom up, creating a standards-based hosting solution that is putting ASPB and HighWire's other publishing partners at the forefront of online publishing.

H2O embeds features and tools that facilitate innovation and interaction via the social web; the Plant Physiology and Plant Cell sites essentially become platforms for the development of ideas, and the architecture is flexible enough to handle new requirements as they emerge.

Take a look at some of the H2O user interface features designed to streamline research:

• Abstract preview: Mouse-over pop-up abstract preview when the table of contents or search results pages are on screen – no need to leave the page.
• Figure expansion in place: Figure and table thumbnails can be enlarged within the article, rather than in a new window.
• Tag-along navigation: The navigation box follows alongside as the reader scrolls down the article page.
• Feature hideaway: Author affiliations, related links, and other article enhancements can be expanded or hidden. Readers' preferences are remembered when they next visit the site.
• Related articles search: One-click search for related articles by author, keyword, or subject classification - from within an article.
• Quick scan: Views easily flow from the title and abstract to previous/next article links, allowing users to quickly scan the content they need.

In addition to these new tools and features, with H2O ASPB is ensured that new industry standards will be infused through all layers of the technology on our journal sites, giving us maximum flexibility as to how the journal content looks and operates. Because the technology is standards-based, journal sites are, in HighWire's words, essentially "future proofed.”

H2O embeds features and tools that facilitate innovation and interaction via the social web; the Plant Physiology and Plant Cell sites essentially become platforms for the development of ideas, and the architecture is flexible enough to handle new requirements as they emerge. The H2O suite of tools and services will also enable ASPB to create collections of information and reuse these collections in feeds, widgets, blogs, and networking sites. We will be able to attach advertising and branding to content or collections, personalize offers and ads, and contextualize web pages based on the content being displayed and the user demographics. Such standards-based content can easily appear on a variety of devices—the iPhone and other smart phones, the iPad, Kindle and other e-readers, and yet-to-be-seen new technologies.

HighWire's director, John Sack, puts it this way: "The journal is a conversation. This conversation is now taking place thru the Internet, with social networks, blogs, tagging, and taxonomy.…The article is not what users want—information is. But information [has been] locked in the ‘article information box.' H2O lets the information out of the box.”

Thanks to H2O, ASPB journal content will be more accessible, and more portable, than ever. It will move content back into the mainstream of the user's workflow, where it belongs.

We welcome your comments and questions. Please send feedback to managing editor John Long.

Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell have been published online with HighWire Press since 1998. HighWire is operated by a nonprofit division of the Stanford University Libraries.

Beginning in January 2011, all article pages in Plant Physiology will cost the same -- the extra fee for each page over 10 will be eliminated. The surcharge was originally instituted in 2006 to encourage tightly written manuscripts and discourage significant repetition between the Results and Discussion sections. However, after speaking with many of you it has become apparent that concise writing is not enough; the amount of information necessary to report research of high quality has increased, and the average length of an article in Plant Physiology is now 13 pages.

Although we still believe that tightly written papers improve the impact of what we publish and encourage concise manuscripts, we want you to be able to tell your story without being constrained.

Cassava is an important food source in many poverty-stricken regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, but the low levels of micronutrients in commercial varieties do little to address hidden hunger. New research published in The Plant Cell shows that a single, naturally arising change in one gene leads to high provitamin A levels in cassava roots and opens the door to addressing vitamin A deficiency via biofortified cassava.

read the full press release