The editor-in-chief is Tom Buckley (University of California, Davis) and the journal is published through Oxford University Press but owned and managed by the Annals of Botany Company a non-profit educational charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

AoBP was one of the first plant science journals to adopt a fully open access publishing model.

AoBP is one of few plant science journals that use double-blind peer review (neither authors nor reviewers know one another's identities); its "sound-science ethos and mission" statement[1] reads, "The mission of AoBP is to provide an outlet for plant-focused research without the biases that affect much of scientific publishing.

These biases include the devaluing of confirmatory or negative results and prejudices against authors based on their personal characteristics (such as gender, ethnicity, affiliation, seniority and reputation).

We prefer to leave judgments about the wider importance of papers to the scientific community."