As the Editor-in-Chief, I sincerely thank readers, editors, and authors for contributing to maintaining JPR as a high-impact journal. We published many excellent papers from over 700 submissions in 2022. During the last couple of years, many improvements were achieved in JPR. The journal impact factor increased from 2.08 (2018) to 3.00 (2021). The number of articles published per year increased from 76.5 (the average of 2018 and 2019) to 81.5 (the average of 2020 and 2021), an increase of 7% compared to the 2-year average. The annual number of downloads of published articles increased by 39% from approximately 156,000 to 217,000 on average over the 2-year period. In addition to maintaining this improvement, we will also try our best to improve JPR as a more friendly and valuable journal to all contributors. In particular, we have added a pre-submission checklist to the submission guidelines on our website, https://www.springer.com/journal/10265/submission-guidelines, for authors to prepare manuscripts more rapidly and correctly, and for editors/publishers to shorten the reviewing and processing periods.

Although I mentioned this in my greeting last year, I continue to ask authors to keep it mind that JPR is an international journal dedicated to the dissemination of fundamental knowledge in all areas of basic plant sciences (https://www.springer.com/journal/10265/aims-and-scope). Also “Papers that are purely descriptive with no clear hypothesis are not suitable for this journal. Manuscripts in the area of applied plant sciences, such as agricultural or medicinal research, are accepted only if the manuscripts contribute to basic plant sciences.” as mentioned in the above website.

We published one JPR symposium issue last year; “Regulation of Cyclic Electron Flow, A to Z” (Takahashi 2022). I regret to inform you that we have no schedule to publish JPR symposium issues this year because we were not able to conduct JPR symposiums at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of Japan and others in 2021 because of COVID-19. We resumed our JPR symposium in the meeting last year and hope to publish symposium issues in 2024.

In addition to regular papers, last year we published six “Current Topics in Plant Research”, as review papers; “Arabidopsis ASYMMETRIC LEAVES2 (AS2): roles in plant morphogenesis, cell division, and pathogenesis” (Machida et al. 2022), “Reconsidering the function of the xyloglucan endotransglucosylase/hydrolase family” (Ishida and Yokoyama 2022), “Gynoecium structure in Sapindales and a case study of Trichilia pallens (Meliaceae)” (El Ottra et al. 2022), “Decades-long phylogeographic issues: complex historical processes and ecological factors on genetic structure of alpine plants in the Japanese Archipelago” (Ikeda 2022), “RAB GTPases and SNAREs at the trans-Golgi network in plants” (Ito and Uemura 2022), and “Metabolic pathway genes for editing to enhance multiple disease resistance in plants” (Kushalappa et al. 2022). These colorful titles show the wide aspects of JPR in basic plant science. These Current Topics in Plant Research should be greatly valuable for readers to understand the current state of plant science.

We thank editors who have rotated off after their 4-year assignments: Dr. Koji Takayama, Dr. Yanhong Tang, and Dr. Atushi Ushimaru. We welcome new editors who begin their 4-year term in January 2022: Dr. Yuki Ogura-Tsujita, Dr. Satoshi Kakishima, and Dr. Yin Wang.

We welcome new Editorial Board members: Dr. Koh Nakamura, Dr. Hajime Ikeda (reappointment), Dr. Koji Takayama, Dr. Daniel Piñero, Dr. Mitsuru Hirota (reappointment), Dr. Shuang-Quan Huang (reappointment), Dr. Toshihiko Kinugasa (reappointment), Dr. Kentaro K. Shimizu (reappointment), Dr. Onno Muller (reappointment), Dr. Yanhong Tang, Dr. Duncan D. Smith, Dr. Ken Naito (reappointment), Dr. Shih-Shun Lin, Dr. Takashi Tsuchimatsu, Dr. Yuki Kondo, Dr. Lauri Nikkanen, Dr. Jeffrey Cameron, and Dr. Rei Narikawa.

In addition to reappointed members, we thank Editorial Board members who have rotated off: Dr. Charles P. Chen, Dr. Chandrashekhar Joshi, Dr. Byung-Ho Kang, Dr. Shin-Ichi Miyazawa, Dr. Tod Stuessy, Dr. Richard Whitkus, Dr. Wenheng Zhang, Dr. Yagut Allahverdiyeva-Rinne, Dr. Jochem Evers, Dr. Yuki Ogura-Tsujita, and Dr. Shizue Yoshihara.

We wish you a Happy New Year, and we warmly welcome submissions of excellent articles in 2023.