Welcome to the final issue of the New Zealand Journal of Crop and Horticultural Science for 2011. There have been several exciting developments for this journal during 2011.
It was particularly gratifying to be able to congratulate one of our Editors, Dr Dianne Gleeson when she won the first ‘Women in Science Entrepreneurship Award’. Dr Gleeson, leads a team providing analytical services detecting new organisms, monitoring pest species, disease monitoring and threatened species management.
Another development during 2011 was the mid-year launch of the new Taylor and Francis Online publishing platform to replace their Informaworld site. There have been a range of benefits: journal alert services have been improved, enabling anyone to sign up for new issue and new publication alerts; the new site is more intuitive to navigate; it has a significantly enhanced search function; immediate data on the most downloaded and the most cited articles is provided. There has also been the introduction of a parallel mobile site, giving Smartphone users access to the journal.
In conjunction with the new website, we have been able to increase the speed with which papers are published electronically on iFirst. This can only be of benefit to all concerned as the time from submission to publication is continually improved.
The success of any journal is the result of a range of factors in which our authors, reviewers and editors play significant parts. I would like to take this opportunity to express my personal appreciation of the work done by all of these people during 2011.
It has been a good year for this journal, and there is every indication that 2012 will be even better. I look forward receiving more interesting papers for publication, to welcoming new authors, and for your continuing support.