A selection of papers published in Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (1836–1990) an introduction

Introduction The Botanical Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1836, published Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh until 1990, when the name of the Society was changed to the Botanical Society of Scotland and the name of the journal was changed to Botanical Journal of Scotland. The change signalled the formalisation of the Society becoming a Scotland-wide organisation, following the earlier establishment of local Groups, such as those at the Universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews, Stifling and Glasgow. The change in the name of the journal occurred shortly after the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE, http://www.rae.ac.uk/) became, in 1986, the basis for assessing the quality of research activity undertaken in university departments. The RAE takes into account the number and quality of publications produced by full-time staff over a time period. A simple measure of quality is the impact factor of the journal in which a research article is published. This method of assessing the value of a publication evidently led to a drop in the number of papers submitted to low impact factor journals, especially local ones. Journals such as those published by the Botanical Society of Edinburgh/Botanical Society of Scotland had no impact factor at all and became regarded by academic staff as a 'waste of time'. The process has become more and more evident with time and the rate of submissions to the Botanical Journal of Scotland has ebbed, reaching such a low that the editor of the journal was required to actively solicit submissions in order to fill an issue. One area of success of the Botanical Journal of Scotland was the publication of papers from special symposia, such those on the environmental history of the Cairngorms (published in Volume 48, Part 1, 1996), or 'Scottish vegetation: plant ecology in Scotland' (published in Volume 49, Part 2, 1997). Unfortunately, these useful compilations have reached very few international readers outside the membership of the Society. Against this backdrop it was decided recently that the publication of the Botanical Journal of Scotland was no longer viable. The options were to abandon its publication, to switch to an irregular on-line publication, or fundamentally redesign it and launch it anew as an aspiring international plant biology journal, Plant Ecology and Diversity. The Council of the Society supported the last of these options. As a result, the reader is holding the last issue of the Botanical Journal of Scotland in their hands. Closing an era provided an opportunity for