Beginning in 1969, scientists began to propose that the nonprofit publishing company
Annual Reviews add a journal title that published
review articles relevant to
cell biology.
Marilyn Farquhar, the 1982 president of the
American Society for Cell Biology, also thought such a journal would be useful. In 1983, Farquhar and other scientists attended a meeting at Annual Reviews to plan the topics and authors for the first volume. The
Annual Review of Cell Biology published its first volume in 1985, with
George E. Palade as the inaugural
editor. Beginning with the eleventh volume, published in 1995, the journal was published under its current name, the
Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. The title change was made to acknowledge that a third of the reviews published by the journal by that point dealt with
developmental biology. As of 2023, it is being published as
open access, under the
Subscribe to Open model. ==Scope and indexing==