From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.
By Gary Krupnick, Editor
Since 1998, The Plant Press has been the official quarterly newsletter of the U.S. National Herbarium and the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History. Since its inception, the newsletter has been printed and delivered free of charge to a broad international subscription base. In 2013, a companion website was launched, making full issues of The Plant Press available as PDFs online, with articles from each issue also individually blogged throughout the quarter.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, production of printed issues stopped, with online publication of the newsletter being the only viable option. After many months of thoughtful discussion following our return to the museum, the editor of The Plant Press and the Chair of the Department of Botany came to the decision to fully transition to an online-only newsletter. Printing will not resume. The January 2020 issue (Vol 23, No. 1) was the last printed issue.
Eliminating print distribution has several benefits including a reduced cost for the Smithsonian, an expedited timeline for readers to access each issue, and a lessened environmental impact saving trees and reducing waste and energy costs. Going forward, every issue will be available as a PDF for download, allowing users to print their own copy should they desire to read a hard copy of the newsletter.
The PDF newsletter still has the same sections as the print version: News, Articles, New Faces, Staff Activities, Travel, Visitors, Honor & Awards, Publications, and Botanical Illustrations. Articles appearing in the PDF newsletter and the blogged articles are identical for the most part, with some online blogged articles having more imagery and hyperlinks.
To access the newsletter online, please visit The Plant Press at https://nmnh.typepad.com/the_plant_press/. Downloadable PDFs of every issue are available under the “Printed Issues” tab at the top of the screen.
To receive quarterly PDF issues by email, please subscribe to The Plant Press listserv by sending a message to listserv@si-listserv.si.edu containing only the following in the body of the text: “SUBSCRIBE PLANTPRESS-NEWS Firstname Lastname” (replace “Firstname Lastname” with your name). Leave the subject line blank.
To have individual blog articles delivered directly to your inbox, you can now set up a subscription service for notifications. On the website, in the box in the upper right, enter your email and click “subscribe”. The new email service is powered by follow.it, which has replaced feedburner, a former service shut down by Google in 2021. Follow.it is provided free of charge and subscribers can set email delivery settings at a frequency of their choosing.
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