Weed Science continues to be one of the premier journals in the discipline and in the agronomic sciences. Submissions to the journal have been down the past couple of years from a high of 221 submissions in 2020 to 155 this past year. The WSSA Publication Board and the Weed Science Editorial Board have been examining ways to increase submissions. Weed Science has been successful in the effort to publish more reviews and symposium articles. Weed Science, Volume 71, will publish eight reviews, which is up from previous years. The journal will continue to seek to publish more reviews and articles related to symposia. It also will seek to put published content within a specific area of interest in an area called collections within the journal home page. The special collections on herbicide resistance, weedy rice, and research methods are in the collection area now.
The last few years and the next few represent some seismic changes in scientific publishing. The most profound of these is the switch from a subscription model for publication to an open access model. Weed Science has been a hybrid journal for several years. Read and Publish arrangements with many universities and research groups with Cambridge University Press make publishing open access an attractive option for many authors. The number of open access articles in Weed Science will be above 70% for Volume 71. Our data show articles published open access tend to have more downloads, social media mentions, and citations over time, which are a good thing for authors and the objective of disseminating knowledge about the weed science discipline. Weed Technology will flip to an open access–only journal starting in January 2024, and Weed Science will follow as an open access–only journal in January 2025.
Weed Science has many goals as a journal. The primary goal is to publish high-quality research from authors. Another goal is to make the publication process as efficient as possible, and that includes constant efforts to reduce the time from submission to publication, as these are career-defining points for authors. I usually point out the time from submission to first decision in these editorials. However, I would like to present data on more of the publication process this year. For the year before October 1, 2023, it took an average of 3.7 days from submission to reviewers being invited to review, 22.1 days for reviews to be completed, and 44 days from acceptance to publication in FirstView. The time from submission to first decision was 45.7 days. The time from submission to publication is favorable when compared with other society-based publications.
I also know the impact factor for journals is important to many authors. The Weed Science impact factor has been relatively flat the past 3 years. For 2022, Weed Science had an impact factor of 2.5. It has been between 2.4 and 2.713 since 2020. The 5-year impact factor was 2.7 for 2022.
For the year preceding October 1, 2023, the journal depended on 167 unique reviewers. The excellent reputation of the journal would not be possible without the cutting-edge research submitted by authors and the diligent work of the editorial board and the hundreds of referred reviews that are submitted annually. I wish to thank the members of the editorial board and reviewers for 2023.
