About Plant Communications

Plant Communications

Plant Communications is an open-access scientific journal covering all areas of plant science, published by Cell Press in partnership with the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and based in Shanghai, China (online ISSN 2590-3462). Launched in 2020 as the open-access sister journal — described by Cell Press as a companion — to Molecular Plant, the long-established Shanghai-based plant biology journal, it publishes original research, important technical advances, useful research resources and outstanding reviews, from genomics and molecular biology to climate resilience and sustainable agriculture. All of its articles are immediately and permanently free to read and download. In 2025 the journal marked five years of publication, having established itself quickly as a high-visibility, fully open-access home for significant advances across the plant sciences.

A sister journal to Molecular Plant

Plant Communications cannot be understood apart from Molecular Plant. That journal was founded in 2008 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Society for Plant Biology and the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences; it was published by Oxford University Press until 2015, when Cell Press — the life-sciences imprint of Elsevier — took over as publisher under an agreement signed in 2014. Molecular Plant rose to rank among the leading journals in plant biology, and its success created both an opportunity and a problem: far more strong plant science was being produced, in China and worldwide, than one selective monthly journal could publish. Elsevier's account of the partnership records that in 2019 Cell Press and the Molecular Plant team established its sister journal, and Plant Communications launched in 2020 as the open-access sibling — broader in capacity, free for every reader, and sharing the Shanghai editorial base and scientific community of its elder title.

Shanghai roots

The journal's institutional home is Shanghai. Its publishing partnership rests on the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the institute cluster whose plant science community also sustains Molecular Plant — working with Cell Press. Copyright in the journal's ScienceDirect listing is held by the Chinese Society for Plant Biology, with publication by Elsevier. This is the distinctive model of the leading Chinese life-science journals of the past two decades: scientific ownership and editorial leadership anchored in a Chinese academy institute, combined with the production, platform and international marketing of a major Western publisher. For Plant Communications, Shanghai is not a mailing address but the source of its editors, its founding community and its first authors — even as its submissions and readership are global.

Aims and scope across the plant sciences

Cell Press describes Plant Communications as dedicated to serving the global plant science community by providing a high-quality open-access publishing platform. It publishes original research addressing fundamental or applied aspects of plant sciences, important technical advances, highly useful research resources and outstanding review articles in all areas of the field — including, in its own enumeration, the evolution, ecology, physiology, biochemistry, development, reproduction and metabolism of plants; molecular and cellular biology; genetics and genomics; environmental interactions; and biotechnology and breeding, for both higher and lower plants, together with their interactions with other organisms throughout the biosphere. The breadth is the point: where Molecular Plant concentrates on highly significant findings with an emphasis on molecular work, Plant Communications was designed as the wide-aperture companion, able to take strong work from any corner of plant science, provided it represents a significant advance, a valuable technique or a resource others will use.

Genomics, molecular biology and the core disciplines

Within that broad scope, the journal's centre of gravity reflects its parentage. Genomics papers — genome assemblies, pangenomes, population genomics and functional genomics of crops and model plants — sit alongside molecular and cellular studies of gene regulation, signalling, development and metabolism. These are the disciplines in which the Shanghai institutes are strongest and in which Molecular Plant built its reputation, and Plant Communications inherits both the expertise of its reviewers and the expectations of its readers. Research resources are a named article category for a reason: in modern plant genomics, a well-constructed database, genome resource or analysis tool can be as influential as a single experimental finding, and the journal gives such work a citable, peer-reviewed home rather than treating it as supplementary material to someone else's paper.

Climate resilience and sustainable agriculture

The journal's fifth-anniversary statement gives its mission a distinctly applied edge: as an international platform, its primary mission is to share exciting science and technical innovations that will contribute to the achievement of sustainable agriculture and diverse ecosystems. That framing connects the journal's basic research to the problems that justify much of its funding — how crops withstand heat, drought, flooding, salinity and new patterns of pests and disease as the climate changes, and how yields can be sustained with fewer chemical inputs and less environmental damage. Work on stress physiology, plant–microbe interactions, breeding and biotechnology in the journal is therefore read in two registers at once: as fundamental knowledge about how plants work, and as the raw material for climate-resilient agriculture. The commissioning record for this profile likewise identifies climate resilience and sustainable agriculture as part of the journal's broad scope, and its special issues and collections regularly organise new work around such cross-cutting themes.

Open access and how it publishes

Plant Communications is fully open access: every article is immediately and permanently free to read and download, with costs carried by an article publishing charge listed by Cell Press at US$3,500 for full-length research and review articles and US$1,750 for short-format correspondence. The model matters for a plant science journal more than for most. Much of the world's agricultural research is done in public institutes, breeding stations and universities in countries where subscription budgets are limited; a journal that places crop genomics and stress biology behind a paywall restricts exactly the readership most able to apply it. Open access also aligns the journal with the funder mandates now common in China, Europe and North America, and with the practice of the Cell Press open-access list, within which Plant Communications is catalogued as a partner journal alongside Molecular Plant.

Indexing and standing

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in Scopus, and its articles are available through PubMed Central, as recorded in the commissioning brief and in journal listings; it is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Bibliometric listings give recent figures that place it firmly in the upper tier of plant science titles: ScienceDirect's journal comparison lists an impact factor of 11.6 and a CiteScore of 14.8, and SCImago-derived listings record an h-index of 48 within its first years — numbers that would be remarkable for any five-year-old journal and that reflect both the volume of strong submissions generated by the Molecular Plant community and the citation density of genomics-heavy plant research. The journal celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2025 with a dedicated anniversary issue and a public message of thanks to its authors, reviewers and readers, describing its first five years as having built a high-quality platform for the global plant science community.

What it offers authors and readers

For authors, Plant Communications occupies a specific niche: a selective but broad-scope, fully open-access journal with the editorial infrastructure of Cell Press and a Shanghai editorial community expert in plant molecular science. Work that is significant and complete but not a fit for the narrower Molecular Plant has a natural second home within the same journal family, and technical advances and resources — often hard to place in journals that prize only conceptual novelty — are explicitly welcomed. For readers, it offers a single free stream of current work across the whole discipline, from evolution and ecology to breeding and biotechnology. In the landscape of Chinese scientific magazines and journals, it is a clear example of the partner-journal model at its most successful: a Chinese academy institute and society owning the title, an international publisher operating it, open access as the default, and — within five years of its 2020 launch — citation standing that many older subscription journals never reach.