Proceedings B has recovered well from this difficult period, with monthly submissions creeping upwards in the second half of 2022, and the journal is attracting high-quality submissions and continuing to diversify its content. Staff are now working regularly at 6–9 Carlton House Terrace, and last May we had the first ‘in-person’ editorial board meeting in London for 2 years. The impression I got at the meeting was that both editors and staff were relieved and enthusiastic to be interacting face-to-face without the constraints imposed by the more structured videoconference format we used in 2020 and 2021. A convivial night at a London pub and our traditional meal for staff and editors at a London restaurant provided ample opportunities for ‘chin-wagging’ and reinforced to us all that the social dimension of our work is critical for building relationships, brainstorming and developing new initiatives, several of which have taken shape during the year.The past 3 years of ‘living with Covid’ have been challenging for scientific publishing, but as I write my year-end review for 2022, there are signs for optimism. Proceedings B by 2026. Currently OA content is downloaded about three times more often than subscription content in the journal. Our times (in median days) to first decision (24), final decision (70) and from submission receipt to publication (98) have all increased somewhat, with our times to first and final decision below our targets. It has been notable this year that many editors, authors and reviewers have requested more time for their assigned tasks resulting in slower times overall. These delays may be partly associated with Covid, but also because of work overload as research and teaching activities expand again after the pandemic. The journal's impact factor rose in 2022 to 5.530 from 5.349 the preceding year. Proceedings B is currently ranked 19th out of 94 journals in the Journal Citation Reports category for ‘Biology’.From 1 January to 31 October 2022, we received 2092 submissions, a decrease of 184 in comparison with the same period in 2021. Because 2021 saw a decrease of 339 articles over the same time period, the 2022 results signal that submission levels are picking up and indeed there was a 4% rise in submission over the second half of the year. Of the 2022 submissions, the proportion rejected (74%) was identical to the previous year. So far, 475 articles have been accepted for publication and of these 232 are open access (OA), a significant increase over 2020 which is encouraging. Our target for OA content this year is 48.2% of published articles. The continuing upward trend is in line with our expectation to make the transition to fully OA for Proceedings B which we hope will help to stimulate these submissions further.We receive submissions from numerous geographical regions, with the largest numbers coming from the USA (483), China (272), UK (239), Germany (120), Australia (109), Canada (101), Japan (83), France (75), Spain (51) and Sweden (42). These rankings are quite similar to last year, although China has now replaced the UK as the country with the second most submissions to the journal. We have continued efforts to attract submissions from under-represented regions and below I discuss our initiatives to increase diversity at Proceedings B and provide an outstanding forum for timely overviews of emerging areas and unresolved questions in biology. Reviews Editor Innes Cuthill has worked hard during the year to maintain a steady flow of submissions on diverse topics. To date he has received 73 proposals of which 54 have been submitted and 19 are published. Our biannual review by the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution President's Award Winner will be published shortly. The article by Lenore Fahrig and colleagues [Review articles are published in most issues of Proceedings B, ‘Theoretical studies of diverse sexual patterns in marine animals’ [The annual Darwin review in animals’  by Yoh IProceedings B involve collections of articles on a single theme chosen by the editors based on the submission of short proposals. Susan Johnston (University of Edinburgh), Nancy Chen (University of Rochester) and Emily Josephs (Michigan State University) guest-edited ‘Wild quantitative genomics: the genomic basis of fitness variation in natural population’ [Special Features in ulation’  comprisiLockdowns associated with the Covid pandemic have made life especially challenging for academic carers. They have often had to navigate working from home at the same time as looking after young children and elderly parents. Because of these difficulties, senior editors Loeske Kruuk (University of Edinburgh), Sarah Brosnan (Georgia State University) and Maurine Neiman (University of Iowa) were inspired to show that despite these domestic constraints, and the shrinking number of hours in a day for science, many carers continued with their academic research. This special feature ‘Despite Covid: showcasing new work in evolutionary biology from academic caregivers in the middle of the pandemic’  is a colProceedings B have languished over the past decade, with relatively few published each year. This article type allows authors to write about particularly interesting research recently published in the journal, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses and discussing unresolved questions and future areas that require more work. Commentaries should explain the significance of the research to non-specialists and be around 2500 words, with one figure and 15 references. In 2022, we made a special effort to increase the number of these submissions by reaching out to our editors and reviewers to identify especially novel articles published in Proceedings B and potential authors of commentaries. We would particularly like early career researchers to write commentaries to help them promote their own academic profiles although this forum is open to all authors. I am pleased to say that our proactivity on this front has borne fruit; so far, this year we have received 10 submissions of which seven are accepted and three are currently under review. We encourage readers of Proceedings B to consider contacting editors if they would like to write a commentary or know a young scientist that might be qualified and enthusiastic about taking on this task.Commentaries in Proceedings B in an effort to attract a wider readership. The new article types we introduced over the past few years continue to attract submissions: Evidence Synthesis (14 submissions and six acceptances) and Biological Science Practices (19 submissions and seven acceptances). I thank editors Gary Carvalho and Stephanie Meirmans, respectively, for their efforts in making these article types as successful as they are. The new subject area for research articles—Biological Applications—that we introduced last year focusses on the application of concepts in the biological sciences for solving problems of environmental and societal relevance. Currently this subject area accounts for 4.2% of all submissions to Proceedings B, probably reflecting the growth in applied research of relevance to policymakers and resource managers associated with food security, climate change and the biodiversity crisis.During 2022, we have continued our efforts to diversify the scope of Proceedings B. Although we have been very successful in changing our editorial board so it is now close to gender parity, the representation of ethnic and geographical diversity among our editors needs to be improved. In addition, we would also like to increase diversity among our authors and reviewers. How these goals might be achieved was discussed at length, and it was generally agreed that it was critical that we expand the conversation to include our Associate Editors (AEs) by holding a video workshop on the topic of increasing diversity at Proceedings B. The workshop was subsequently organized by Stephanie Meirmans, Maurine Neiman and Shalene Singh-Shepherd on 8 November. All AEs were invited to the workshop and an impressive number of participants (45) engaged enthusiastically via Zoom to discuss three key questions: (i) what does diversity mean to you? (ii) does diversity matter and why? and (iii) how do you envision ways in which AEs can help improve diversity? These discussions resulted in a ‘Diversity Action Plan’ which includes several initiatives. These include including an annual commitment to recruit more AEs from Africa, Asia and South America and to also expand the pool of reviewers from these regions. To assist new reviewers from developing countries, we also plan to develop several blogs on how to write a good review suitable for Proceedings B with examples. Fortunately, because of our adoption of the Web of Science transparent peer review system (formerly Publons Open Peer review), in which the review history of a paper is now published, this will serve as a valuable resource for inexperienced reviewers.At our board meeting in May, we organized a break-out session in which senior editors and staff focused on how we might increase diversity at Proceedings B and also encourage submissions from researchers in countries that only occasionally publish in the journal. Also, by expanding the global representation of our reviewer pool, we are hopeful that this will help to counter the problem of ‘reviewer fatigue’. Finding sufficient reviewers for submissions is becoming an increasing problem for many scientific journals and requires increasing numbers of referee invitations before the desired number of reviews is obtained.Our goal with the Diversity Action Plan is not to simply increase diversity for the sake of diversity, but rather to appreciate and understand the practical benefits that this is likely to bring to the journal. For example, having AEs and reviewers from diverse regions should bring fresh perspectives to Proceedings B should increase the length of papers to 10 000 words. With a backdrop of increased print and postage costs, the decline in the market for print copies and the Royal Society's green agenda starting in January 2023, Proceedings B will no longer be in print—an historic but necessary change. From next year, the journal will also no longer require page charges for authors publishing under the non-OA model.Several new journal developments this year that should be of interest to our readers include increasing the length of papers and dropping print and page charges in 2023. A recent author survey indicated that many authors found the limit of 10 printed pages too low. A particular frustration was when important information had to be moved to the supplementary materials during revision because of the length limit. Most other journals operate to specific word counts rather than page limits, and it was therefore agreed at our editor's meeting that Proceedings B has been a valuable experience which has broadened your horizons. As I mentioned last year in my editorial, it is heartening that most individuals whom we contact about joining the editorial board accept our offer and many also agree to continue for a second term despite the numerous other work pressures that academic life brings. Over the past few months, we have recruited 29 new AEs, 44% of whom are female, thus maintaining the near gender parity on our editorial board. Among the new cohort are AEs from Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.I extend my thanks to the 10 Senior Editors and 152 AEs for their dedication in handling in an expeditious manner the large volume of submissions we receive, evaluating reviews and making recommendations. For those who are coming to the end of their terms and are leaving us in 2023, I hope that your work with Proceedings B runs efficiently and on time. Lastly, I would like to thank the Publishing Editor of Proceedings B, Shalene Singh-Shepherd for her support, enthusiasm and wise council. Shalene is always open to new initiatives and this year has spearheaded several new projects that are helping to transform the journal as well as mentoring our first Proceedings B intern—Laura Steel (Oxford University)—who has been helping us with the analysis of data submissions. I wish you all a healthy, prosperous and productive 2023 and look forward to another successful year at Proceedings B.To conclude, I would like to thank our editorial team in London, consisting of Editorial Coordinators Jennifer Kren and Callum Shoosmith and Production Editor Simon Clackson, for their attention to detail and conscientious work in making sure that


Nature Communications has received thousands of submissions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and accepted hundreds for publication. To showcase the breadth and quality of this work, we are now launching a COVID-19 Collection, and here we reflect on our editorial processes during this period.Over the last two and a half years,  Nature Communications is well-placed to facilitate this owing to our multidisciplinary scope, open access model, and system of continuous online publication. However, we have also had to ensure that speed has not come at the cost of publishing standards.Keeping up with the pace and volume of scientific research during the pandemic has presented a significant editorial challenge. There has been a genuine need to ensure that important findings across a range of fields are peer-reviewed and made available to a global audience as rapidly as possible. As always, peer reviewers have played a vital role in ensuring the quality of the submissions that we accept for publication. We are very grateful to the many hundreds of scientists who provided insightful peer review reports with faster than usual deadlines during the pandemic. To reduce duplication of reviewer effort, we have promoted our portable peer review policy, which allows papers rejected at other journals to be submitted with their peer review reports. Most often, this involves transfer between journals within the Nature Portfolio, but we also encourage authors to make this request when submitting work previously reviewed at external publishers willing to engage with the portable peer review concept, in order to save time and resources.“We are very grateful to the many hundreds of scientists who provided insightful peer review reports with faster than usual deadlines during the pandemic.”‘scoop-protection’ policy that allows us to consider multiple papers on similar topics or that reproduce results published elsewhere when received within a short timeframe. In further recognition of the importance of reproducibility and transparency, we have recently tightened our policies on the availability of data, code, materials and associated protocols. We also continue to encourage our authors to accept the option to publish peer review reports alongside the final version of their article, adding clarity to our editorial decisions.The rapid pace of COVID-19 research has inevitably meant that different research groups have been working on the same scientific questions simultaneously. We have supported these researchers by applying our Our new Collection highlights some of the most impactful and innovative work that we have published across the spectrum of COVID-19 research, including papers in immunology, vaccines, pathology, therapy, epidemiology, public health, and molecular and cell biology. We also have a Clinical Collection, that presents articles, including results from clinical trials relating to COVID-19, in this growing area for the journal. There is, however, still much to be understood about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease. Emerging topics that we hope our journal can contribute to in the coming months include:Improvements to vaccines and therapies ;Better understanding of host-pathogen interactions ;Estimating impacts of COVID-19 interventions on other infectious diseases .Nature Communications continues to welcome all submissions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic as we find our way out of it.


Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery (ICVTS)—one of our European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS) flagship journals—has been steadily and successfully evolving since 2002 and converted to open access in August 2021. As the dawn of the new year has passed, it is our privilege to announce the relaunch of ICVTS as Interdisciplinary CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery. This relaunch has been in making for a year now and we are honoured to share with you the vision beyond this relaunch, the new aims and scope and how we anticipate the journal will develop in coming years.Scientific publishing has undergone unprecedented proliferation in the past 2 decades with abundancies in journals to publish, even for a relatively small field of CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery. As the number of research papers published has skyrocketed, the ‘disruptiveness’ of the research has dropped significantly, according to an analysis of millions of manuscripts and patents compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that was done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to set a new disruptive direction and render previous work obsolete , 2.The phrase ‘To Publish or Perish’ has gained dominance in academic promotions, career development and the medical industry’s product development/launch pathways. There are multiple drivers, some with financial incentives, that determine the research that is conducted and published. The central gravity of all of this—as the marker of excellence—is the journal impact factor. However, the journal impact factor does not necessarily reflect whether an article published in a high-impact journal is impactful in our field. When comparing journals, the percentage of highly cited papers is more informative than the average number of citations. Especially for IFs below 10, the metric is ineffectual as a measure of the fraction of published papers that are in the top 1% of most-cited papers in the journal's research area. This is just simple statistics as the citation distribution of articles in a journal is skewed by the relatively few ‘hits’, which makes the average number of citations a weak measure of the central tendency of the citation distribution, especially for journals with IF below 10. Therefore, the focus of this relaunch is to promote, drive and publish what will impact our field by forward looking at the trajectory of our discipline.ICVTS will remain. We allow direct submissions, keep transfers from the ICVTS and publish online only and in open access style. The peer review process will ascertain that the published findings are new, true and relevant. All types of comments remain welcome—so we keep the interactive part of the science in ICVTS.Even though we change the name, the successful markers of the Indeed, the structure of healthcare is moving from being organized around a singular time point to treat singular pathology by a single physician, to a multidisciplinary approach. Patients with a cardiovascular and thoracic disease have a condition for life that requires lifetime management by dedicated multidisciplinary teams with expertise in the same pathology but with different skill sets. It does not make any sense anymore for those who work closely together to publish in silos, interpret data separately and manage patients based on their discipline-driven preferences.In addition, technological advances in healthcare are now driven by interdisciplinary research that covers the medical, the biomedical, the physical, the engineering and the computer sciences and beyond. To advance the field further, we need to partner with those outside our discipline who are doing research in the field of CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery.The importance of a multidisciplinary approach and interdisciplinary research is the reason that we have decided to relaunch the journal to promote research advancing all aspects related to surgical interventions of patients with CardioVascular and Thoracic diseases.ICVTS is just the start of the major development of the journal that will take some years, and, in this process, we consider our readership and authors as partners.The journal aims to bring all those involved in CardioVascular and Thoracic research together around a disease rather to accept the status quo of having researchers publish and conduct research in different silos on the same pathology. Therefore, the journal will continue to publish what we have been publishing, however, by widening the aims and scope we are widening our readership and authorship and promoting collaborations across disciplines. The relaunch of ICVTS is organized into 8 different sections allocated to a disease. Each section will be managed by a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary group of editors. These sections are as follows:The new valvular heart disease,vascular disease,coronary disease,heart failure,cardiac arrhythmia,thoracic oncology,thoracic non-oncology andcongenital disease.The focus on the disease will enable our readership to have a wide overview of the developments within their interests and expertise. We anticipate that it will also promote collaborative research.ICVTS. The 2024 impact factor that will be released in 2025 will be reported separately for old and new ICVTS. This means that, in 2025, the journal will receive two 2024 impact factors reflecting 1 year’s citation data for each name, instead of 2. The 2025 impact factor, released in 2026, will return to normal and will be solely for the new ICVTS. Although we expect a possible bump in journal impact factor in 2025, the new interdisciplinary format will not only strengthen its position within the surgical community but also crucially will impact our field, the most important incentive behind this generational change.In any given year, the impact factor is the ratio between the number of citations received in that year for publications in that journal that were published in the 2 preceding years and the total number of ‘citable items’ published in that journal during the 2 preceding years. This means that the 2022 impact factor released this summer and the 2023 impact factor released in 2024 will be solely the impact factor of old


INTRODUCTION 1 This article bookends Winters’ description byexplaining how Selma and Lois DeBakey were also “icons of medicalpreservation” who asked, “Shall we nourish the biomedical archivesas a viable and indispensable source of information, or shall we bury theirashes and lose a century or more of consequential scientifichistory?”2 Inaddressing this question posed by Selma and Lois DeBakey and spotlighting theiranswers in their own engaging words, we highlight the relevance of theiradvocacy for the medical humanities and its influence to inform humanisticapproaches to science and medicine. More broadly, their advocacy inspires us toappreciate the historical record as we think critically about how we communicatethe experience of medicine and science, learn from it today, and preserve it fortomorrow.In his 2016 article published in this journal, Dr. William Winters describedSelma and Lois DeBakey as “icons of medical communication” whobelieved that “nothing hinders communication as much as words, when theyare used badly or incorrectly.” Figure1) were not merely passionate about clear language inbiomedical communications; they were ardent, unwavering, and provocative advocates.They intended their frequent hyperbolic and humorous, if not sometimes sarcastic,approaches to calling out poor communication as a means to demonstrate the absurdityof that communication and the need to remedy it for the sake of the communicatorsand those they were trying to inform.Selma and Lois DeBakey .Later in the video, Lois utilized cartoons she commissioned from Dick Putney of theWhile Selma and Lois were concerned about communicating in plain language, they wereequally concerned with its preservation—indeed, the very physical paper uponwhich it was written and published. The arguments they asserted three decades agoregarding paper are equally relevant today, with ephemeral digital publicationsbeing just as vulnerable to loss as the fragile paper of the previous century. Asthey wrote in their seminal article, “Our Silent Enemy: Ashes in OurLibraries,”2Scholars, scientists, physicians, other health professionals, and librarians facea crucial decision today: shall we nourish the biomedical archives as a viableand indispensable source of information, or shall we bury their ashes and lose acentury or more of consequential scientific history?To this question, the sisters posed clear and convincing facts:Biomedical books and journals published since the 1850s on self-destructingacidic paper are silently and insidiously scorching on our shelves. Theassociated risks for scientists and physicians are serious—incompleteassessment of past knowledge; unnecessary repetition of studies that havealready led to conclusive results; delay in scientific advances when importantconcepts, techniques, instruments, and procedures are overlooked; faultycomparative analyses; or improper assignment of priority.They continued:The archives also disclose the nature of biomedical research, which builds onpast knowledge, advances incrementally, and is strewn with missteps,frustrations, detours, inconsistencies, enigmas, and contradictions. Thepublic’s familiarity with the scientific process will avoid unrealisticexpectations and will encourage support for research in health. But a properhistorical perspective requires access to the biomedical archives. Sincejournals will apparently continue to be published on paper, it is folly topersist in the use of acidic paper and thus magnify for future librarians andpreservationists the already Sisyphean and costly task of deacidifying theircollections.Further, they argued:If it is not worthpreserving, is it worth publishing?Our plea for conversion to acid-free paper is accompanied by an equally strongappeal for more rigorous criteria for journal publication. The glut of journalarticles—many superficial, redundant, mediocre, or otherwise flawed andsome even fraudulent—has overloaded our databases, complicatedbibliographic research, and exacerbated the preservation problem. Beforeaccepting articles, journal editors should ask: And they concluded:It is our responsibility to protect the integrity of our biomedical recordsagainst all threats. Authors should consider submitting manuscripts to journalsthat use acid-free paper, especially if they think, as most authors do, thatthey are writing for posterity. Librarians can refuse to purchase journalspublished on acidic paper, which they know will need restoration within a fewdecades and will thus help deplete their budgets. All of us can urge ourgovernment to devise a coordinated national conservation policy that will haltthe destruction of a century of our historical record. The battle will not beeasy, but the challenge beckons urgently. The choice is ours: we can answer thecall, or we can deny scientists, physicians, and historians the records theyneed to expand human knowledge and improve health care.Selma and Lois proceeded to argue their case methodically, beginning with the keyquestion, “Why is preservation necessary?” and answering it convincinglywith perspectives steeped in the humanities:For intellectual, historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reasons,among others. One of the characteristics that distinguishes the human race fromother members of the animal kingdom is the ability and desire to recordinformation for posterity—to produce a collective memory that spanscenturies, cultures, and national borders. Paper has been a primary medium forrecording the history of our civilization, so its durability is of paramountimportance. The benefits humanity derives from this historical record arenumerous and well known—evident not only in more creature comforts andaesthetic and intellectual pleasures from art, literature, and music but also inour improved health and wellbeing. As Cicero aptly stated, “History is thewitness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizesmemory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity .”Selma and Lois also began to answer their next question, “Why preservescientific publications?” with a distinctive humanistic perspective, statingthat “the past as prologue” meansto ignore the silent enemy in our midst is to degrade the work and wisdom of ourpredecessors. To consign past ideas and observations to passive euthanasia as weexult over the wonders of modern high-technology is presumptuous; without pastknowledge, those wonders would not have occurred. How do we place presentknowledge in proper perspective if we go blindly forward, in loose-cannonfashion, without absorbing, assessing, and assimilating all previous knowledgeon a subject? The proliferation of such isolated observations without properinterpretation may massage the egos of individual workers but ill serves scienceand humanity.Among the specific reasons why libraries and the medical profession should preservescientific publications was their “historical value,” Selma and Loisargued:In the pages of the scientific archives are much of interest and value tohistorians: human drama—of the psychosomatically, chronically, and gravelyill; of scientific rivalry, deceit, and bitter debate; of the courageous whoself-experimented or toiled day and night in tiny, ill-equipped laboratories,patiently pursuing some scientific truth….Additionally, they argued, the preservation of scientific publications needs tohappen for the sake of “bibliographic research,” because“…the responsible investigator begins each prospective research projectwith a thorough bibliographic search of previous publications on the subject understudy.” It also needs to happen to help the biomedical scientific enterprise“avoid dangers of overlooking previous work,” and for the sake of thegreater good, encompassing “editors, reviewers, the press, and thepublic.”Together, Selma and Lois answered the call to preservation by advocating for the useof acid-free, permanent paper within the medical publishing industry to preservemedical records for future generations. Lois herself served as an expert consultantto the National Library of Medicine (NLM), whose congressionally mandated missioninvolved—and still involves—preserving biomedical communication in allits forms. At the NLM, she influenced the establishment and achievements of itsPermanent Paper Task Force, which grew out of the institution’s earlierstrategic planning around preservation of its collections.Scientific American, the Task Force was composed of commercial,academic, and professional society publishers as well as editors, authors, papermanufacturers and distributors, printers, librarians, and preservationists.Established in 1987 and cochaired by Lois and Gerald Piel, chairman emeritus ofReport on Progress inImplementing National Policy on Acid-Free Paper published in 1992attested to the achievements of this initiative: “The efforts of the NLMPermanent Paper Task Force [having been] met with gratifying success, noting that,as of October 1991, one half of the more than 3000 of the world’s leadingbiomedical journals indexed by NLM are acknowledged by their publishers to be usingacid-free paper, up from less than four percent in 1987.” Moreover, the reportoffered that “those journals are the annual equivalent of 1.1 million pages sofar that will not have to be eventually microfilmed, a cost avoidance of the orderof $200,000 each year at NLM,” that “four-fifths of the indexed Americanmedical journals are now acid-free,” and that “the trend to greateracid-free paper utilization can be expected to continue as the advantages of theeconomics and technology of alkaline papermaking are becoming reflected in the papermarket.”5The group sought to make publishers and printers aware of the problems of acidicpaper use, and its solutions, to help authors and editors with their concerns aboutmaking their works lasting by using acid-free paper, to alert professional societiesin biomedicine and other disciplines to the need for permanence of theirpublications, and to encourage the application of realistic standards in the makingand use of permanent paper. The Congressional 6—but also theknowledge and research of the field communicated in printed form that would shapethe future historical record and the experience and expertise of future generationsof biomedical professionals. In our expanding digital age, as paper gives way to thecomplex and proliferating ecosystem of born-digital material in the field ofbiomedicine and every other field, the advocacy of Selma and Lois DeBakey holdsintellectual currency for the medical humanities and its influence to informhumanistic approaches to science and medicine. More broadly, their advocacy inspiresus to appreciate the historical record as we think critically about how wecommunicate the experience of medicine and science, learn from it today, andpreserve it for tomorrow.In their advocacy for biomedical communication—access to it via plain language,and preservation of the very paper on which this language was printed—Selmaand Lois were provocative, pragmatic, unrelenting, and impactful. Morefundamentally, they were humanists to their respective cores, believers in the veryagency of human beings and, in particular, biomedical professionals, to thinkcritically and proceed empirically in biomedicine so its outcomes could be asmeaningful and impactful as possible to society. Indeed, Selma and Lois togetherappreciated what humanistic thinking and action could contribute to the field ofbiomedical communication: to help preserve not only the “passion formedicine”—as Lois entitled her 1987 coauthored book with PhilManning


PLOS Biology enters its third decade, we reflect on our mission, what has changed, what remains to be done and our wishes for the future.PLOS began publishing influential open access science in 2003. As  As PLOS Biology enters its third decade, we reflect on our mission, what has changed, what remains to be done and our wishes for the future. PLOS Biology 20th Anniversary Collection.This article is part of the PLOS Biology “to demonstrate that high-quality journals can flourish without charging for access” [2003 was a remarkable year. The world marveled at the completion of the Human Genome Project, Twitter and Facebook did not yet exist and, as the first Chinese manned space mission took flight, so too did  access” . This yefreely available 6 months after publication —an idea so radical that it failed to gain traction, prompting PLOS to become a publisher to demonstrate what was possible. Now, major funders across the world, such as the signatories of Plan S and the US Office of Science and Technology, request immediate open access (OA) publication for the research that they fund. In 2003, when PLOS Biology appeared on the scene, only a handful of life science journals were OA. The picture is dramatically different now: the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 18,881 journals and >8.5 million articles  that go beyond OA, including, for example, the requirement that all underlying data be made freely available upon publication. While we see OA as a good beginning, full access to the results of scientific research, as well as to the code, software and materials generated, and to the methodological details that enable reproduction should be the direction of travel.In the years following the launch of its flagship, bioRχiv in 2013 and medRχiv in 2019, and there are now over 50 platforms covering biology and/or medicine. We were early supporters, and now most journals accept preprint submissions and even integrate preprint servers into their workflows, as we do by allowing bidirectional posting to bioRχiv. Major funders and institutions recognize preprints as evidence of productivity in grant, hiring and tenure applications, which has boosted the practice. In the future, some form of (pre)publication, followed by peer review  and curation seems a likely scenario for scientific publishing; eLife’s recent changes to their publishing model are a move in this direction.The growth and increased acceptance of preprint servers in the life sciences in the past ten years has also shaken up research communication. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory launched innovative publishing models, including PLOS Biology’s Community Action Publishing.Nice as it is to see how far the needle has moved in transforming research communication, our work is not done. For example, OA has moved the access barrier to publication rather than to reading an article, which is a problem that we have not yet solved. PLOS is actively trying to address this issue through Review Commons and Peer Community In, as well as championing portable peer review for articles that have had an initial assessment elsewhere and continue the process with us, rather than starting from scratch. We have had positive experiences so far, but the implementation of a large cross-publisher agreement to share reviewer reports and identities (with their permission) or journal-independent review at a system-wide scale would avoid futile peer review cycles that waste reviewer and researcher time.Improvements to the peer review process and making it sustainable in the face of increasing research output remains an important pain point. We are actively engaging with journal-independent peer review through platforms such as As a community, we need better ways of crediting different research outputs and of crediting individual contributions to articles that have ever-larger authorship teams. We also need systemic change in how we fund science and hire/promote researchers, moving away from perverse incentives based on journal-level metrics, which reinforce practices that decrease the overall reliability of the scientific output. We should be assessing the specific contributions made by an applicant’s work and, importantly, the robustness and reliability of said work. However, systemic change towards more reproducible research will not occur until researchers are incentivized to invest the time and resources required for OS, which are currently undervalued or not considered at all. This should change.Open Science Indicators to measure OS practices. We expect that developments in this space, such as the community consensus on core open science practices to monitor in biomedicine that we publish in this issue [Admittedly, the robustness, transparency or reliability of research is not easy to measure and easy-to-use proxies are often required to allocate scarce resources/positions when there are large numbers of applications. Article-level metrics, which PLOS introduced in 2009, are an improvement over the journal impact factor for assessing a specific scientific contribution. However, measuring the openness and reproducibility of research outputs is currently not straightforward. To help address this problem, PLOS, in collaboration with DataSeer, has recently developed a suite of is issue , will sopaper mills. This is why we believe that selectivity is a useful editorial criterion and one we plan to continue to uphold , while facing challenges such as the growing presence of  results ).PLOS Biology editors of the future take stock, we hope they see progress on these fronts and that we have been part of the solution.In 20 years’ time, when the PLOS Biology—research on how research is designed, performed, communicated, used and assessed is more important than ever if we are to design data-driven strategies to address some of research’s pressing issues.As we look to the future, in addition to our more traditional scope, we also want to draw attention to areas of keen societal relevance, such as planetary health and global change biology, emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, metabolism and metabolic disease, aging and age-related diseases, neural disease, and cancer, as well as rapidly developing areas such as biotechnology and structural biology. Meta-research will also remain a key focus for PLOS Biology papers and reflect on their contribution to the field. The first two [During this year of celebration, reflection and inspiration, we have commissioned Perspectives that look back at landmark irst two , 6 coverirst two , and an irst two . We willAs we begin our third decade, we would like to hear from you, our readers, authors, reviewers and editors. As we said in our first issue, “PLoS Biology is yours. Download it, copy it, incorporate it in your own database, post or reprint any article; use your imagination. We ask only that you give fair credit to the authors of any work that you use” . This is


For a long time, the scientific community has demonstrated uneasiness with what is said and written in the academic community. It seems that a skeptical wave emerges from the democratization and consequent demystification of the media, among them, scientific journals.Currently, the possibility of bias is common, as is lack of investigative strictness and even lack of veracity in many worldwide magazines. The conflict of interest, when peers participate in projects whose results, positive or not, favor a company where the researcher is employed or has any liaison or benefit, and the need of scientific production generated by the academic system, in which those who publish the most earns more, lead to uncountable clone works with solely one research as main source. Moreover, the rising of apocryphal “spokesman” media of commercial companies, that publish articles with a content slightly beyond scientific interest, have brought about a weakness in the reliability of reading material. In a certain way, this kind of incredulity may be extremely healthy as it extracts the dogmatism present in the written word and that old feeling of what is in writing has to be true, especially when endorsed by an international publication database, beginning to experience significant changes. This exceptional change condition reveals that, as everything in life, both sides should be considered: first is favoring and widening the actions of the scientific-literary review, as the possibility of any professional to read, absorb, criticize and reflect over each of the 8,000 or more medical publications published each year would be unthinkable.The rising of professionals with scientific commonsense, research knowledge and the analytical skills to analyze and convey opinion on the main media and its publications begins to shape up. In the same way, the valorization of a journal’s acceptance index, by impact and quote factors, shows “who is who” in the ruthless competition for a place in the sun in the medical scientific publishing universe.It is obvious that, despite the improvements, incoherence occurs in such cases as with inappropriate sampling of the main indexes used, such as the ISI, given that very few publications are indexed on JCR, from where factor source is obtained, and therefore, present a sampling bias. Anyway, the bright side of the skeptical pessimism would be, in the med-term, the appreciation of quality instead of quantity. The dark side of the situation would be the progressive denial of the media with the reduction of its reliability. Probably both sides will tend to come closer, what has been actually occurring, in a certain way, with the natural selection of magazines, being the survivors those with the highest demand, probably because they present more scientific value (at least from the reader’s point of view) and the rising of journals specialized in searching for impacting articles in several areas of knowledge. Adding this to the several institutes specialized in the production of systematic review of the literature brings us through which we could renew the credibility of scientific journals, while at the same time favoring sound and rigorous research.But it is important to remember that not all professionals have the time or disposition, or even the skills, to collect useful information from scientific articles. We know that much of this information is hidden by methods and statistical tricks, which are not always at reach, or maybe are not noticed during distracted reading. For this group of “excluded souls”, due to lack of time, lack of concentration or education, a safe substitute must be conceived.Nowadays we consider this to be the role of medical school professors and specialized congress lecturers. We have observed that we barely take classes where the lecturer does not present any bibliographical reference when controversial concepts or novelties are mentioned. This is a healthy measure and fosters knowledge dissemination in a more critical manner. However, the use of references is expected to be made with criteria and limits, and besides, that everyone does it, standardizing lectures and changing our culture of informal knowledge, where concepts are expressed and propagated, without mentioning their source, creation process or validation. This is where Congresso Triologico de Otorrinolaringologia could set a trend.The change of lecturing invitations into a kind of free-paper evaluation could help build this eminently scientific and rigorous tendency to presentations. A system with this characteristic, besides guaranteeing deeper care in the preparation of presentations, could help standardize their format and minimum requirements, besides being the possible way in to the academic life for many promising young people who sometimes have their introduction delayed because of their distance to congress decision circles, as they are neither in large schools nor in build-up education centers.During the last three Brazilian and Triologico Congresses we have been progressively improving the format of free communication analysis, in order to standardize it and adequate it to a scientific accreditation policy.Today an evaluation system based on the platform of the Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology is in use, using the online system and the reviewers of our journal. We also foster the basic scientific assumptions for the investigation process chosen by our Magazine. In a certain way, this has professionalized the inner workings of the projects and made feasible the evaluation to be executed by three judges, in a double-blind format, for each topic sent.The strictness level is yet not the same as in the journal, as goals are different, but it is aiming to that direction, at least in what concerns oral presentations that, in the Triologico Congress, tend to occupy even further the prime time of the events. Currently the evaluation process is divided into four steps: in the first one, the formats of projects are evaluated so that they fulfill all RBORL submission requirements. Projects must be complete, with results, discussion and conclusions duly clear and a structured abstract must be presented. Once the requirements are fulfilled, the work’s content is evaluated and if there is a scientific question, it will be judged for oral presentation and will be eligible to an award. If it is a project of investigation of series of cases or a rare case description, it will be forwarded to be presented as poster. After the presentation format is defined, if approved, the work is evaluated in regards to the theme area it is included, so that the judges qualified in that area are allocated.At first, every work receives three opinions, double-blind, where the topic must be evaluated regarding the impact on the specialty, methodological appropriation, results’ transparency, discussion properness and conclusion consistency. In addition to the grade received, all projects must be approved or not for Congress presentation. The grade average will define if the project is within the top 10 best of the specialty area and if it will run for the award of “Best Scientific Work – BSW”, if the work will be presented orally at the Congress, if it will be presented as a poster or if it will be refused. Finally, during Congress, all works presented, in any format, will be judged by an in-house committee, and the BTW awards, best young researcher project and best poster will be announced.For this task to be completed, an army of skilled reviewers experienced in scientific review is necessary, recruited from the publishing team of the Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and along with the co-workers that have already gone through this process of scientific approval during post-graduation, having, at least, a master degree or their PhDs. Thus, we consider we reached an excellent judgment standard that is perfected during the process, given that there are preparatory meetings to determine the level of requirements and the operational procedures of the evaluation process at the event’s site.In the current process, 100 judges were recruited for the first two steps and another 100 will be called for the Congress judgment.Four hundred papers were submitted and approved, several with very high scientific standards, contributing to our event’s quality. The winner is the specialty, the winner is the specialist.Having said that, I’d like to thank all judges, reviewers and committee members who participated in the previous selection process, in-house evaluation and free-paper discussion of oral presentation or posters of our Triologico Congress, saying that they already are and will always be fully responsible for the seriousness and quality of our scientific events.Regards,


Authors would include a link in their published manuscripts to an updatable website (e.g. a GitHub repository) that could be disseminated in the event of any amendment. Such a system is already in place for computer code and requires nothing but buy-in from the scientific community—a community that is already evolving towards open science frameworks. This would remove a number of frictions that discourage amendments leading to an improved scientific literature and a healthier academic climate.The ideal of self-correction in science is not well served by the current culture and system surrounding amendments to published literature. Here we describe our view of how amendments could and should work by drawing on the idea of an author-led version control system. We report a survey ( PeoplThis is to say nothing about academia's difficult relationship with authors owning mistakes ,2,7. IndThen there is the simple opportunity cost of dealing with relatively minor issues in a paper. Those that vex but are not worth the time and effort to correct , or instThis is all aggravating because the Internet offers us a way forward through version control. The static face of academic publications is a holdover from times where print held sway, but the dynamic and reflective nature of the Internet is much more in keeping with how science should operate . We prop. 2Imagine adding a link to published papers, which would direct readers to an online, open and updateable repository . Such a framework would be used by the authors of the paper to add any update to said paper. Updates can be amendments, text corrections, additional data and analysis. These updates would not alter the journal's version of record. This system would not need any involvement from the journals (except providing the link).We developed a survey to enquire about scientists' knowledge, exposure and experience with the process of issuing a correction . We alsWe then finished with a suggestions box so that people could expand on this or related points. We built the survey using Google forms and disseminated it over Twitter as well as contacting 13 researchers who we know had an interest in this area with the request to spread it through their Twitter network.. 3We recorded 132 respondents (see the supplementary data for full results), two-thirds of whom were in the life sciences across career stages. Remarkably, almost a third of respondents were unaware it was possible to make amendments to peer-reviewed publications. In keeping with previous results , the per. 4https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyverse/releases).We suggest that every published paper includes a link to a page controlled by the authors, for instance, a GitHub repository . This is already in place for things like supplementary data and code in line with open science practices ,14. Herehttps://semver.org/) where X is a major additional analysis, Y is a minor additional analysis and Z is a correction. This would display as—‘Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. - VERSION 1.0.0’ for the initial publication, and a correction as ‘Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. - VERSION 1.0.1’ with updates containing a link to the GitHub release page . The purpose of the link could be raised by the authors to the journal editors during submission.We hope that our relatively frictionless system would engender a culture of correction including an awareness of correction as a possibility . AdherinThere are some potential issues with our proposal. For one, there is a separation between the amendment and the journal, although this could also be considered as a positive as argued before. The onus here is on the authors to advertise any changes. The semantic versioning system using the same title as the paper should help here in terms of search engines turning up both. Further, as noted earlier, interested readers could follow a GitHub repository of a paper so they are alerted to any changes. Non open access journals could take issue with wholesale replication of the publication outside of their website. Here authors could discuss changes to specific sections of the paper that only those with access to the paper could make sense of. Then there are questions of what to do if the paper is so flawed that it needs to be retracted or instances of malpractice. In this case we agree that contacting the journal is best practice. Though here again, initial concerns could be flagged early by the authors.We argue that the concerns raised in our survey as well as our own thoughts of potential shortcomings are not unique to this system. Disagreement among co-authors, visibility of the amendment and malpractice are some issues that pertain just as much to the current system of corrections ,16. For . 6Our findings add weight to the view that the current system of academic publication hinders science by disincentivizing corrections and amendments to published literature . A syste


DEAR COLLEAGUES,Arquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia e Metabologia, when the editors Thales Martins, from basic science, and Waldemar Berardinelli, from clinical research, created the current Archives of Endocrinology & Metabolism.It was 1951, under the name of Instituto de Endocrinologia da Santa Casa . Notwithstanding, an exception could be made for well-written, synthetic, and well-documented articles which followed the publication’s standards. One volume per year would be published, in one or more fascicles, if enough material was submitted.At that time, the Journal’s main scope was to register the researches developed at the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa , today the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico . Since then, the Journal’s affirmation has greatly depended on the efforts of its founders, becoming a regular publication in 1978, under the command of Dr. Armando de Aguiar Pupo, and with the support of an editorial board primarily composed of Brazilian endocrinologists.In the first available online version of the Journal  was publArquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia e Metabologia was already the official body for scientific dissemination of the Brazilian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism and the Brazilian Society of Diabetes. Manuscripts in Portuguese or English by leading researchers in the field  were published. Prof. Antônio Roberto Chacra, a great diabetologist, was the editor and director responsible for the Journal, which had the support of a strong editorial commission and was hosted at Escola Paulista de Medicina. On that occasion, the Arquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia e Metabologia was included in the Index Medicus Latinoamericano, Excerpta Medica, Chemical Abstracts and Biological Abstracts.When I became an endocrinologist, in 1986, the Becoming a postgraduate student right after specializing in endocrinology and metabolism made me realize the importance of producing high-quality academic work and sharing my findings with the scientific community. Both my supervisor and my mentor, Prof. Helena Schmid, and the Head of the Endocrinology Service of the Hospital de Clínicas, Jorge Luis Gross, respectively, took their PhD in Ribeirão Preto, and played a key role in transmitting this perception to me.Arquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia e Metabologia, a review which intended to compile the effects of hyperglycemia upon the DAG-PKC pathway, vascular dysfunction related to it, and new perspectives regarding treatment of chronic vascular complications of diabetes based on the inhibition of this pathway , which makes me extremely proud of my research work and represents the teaching and training of graduate students who integrate my research group.In the following years, I became a Master and then PhD’s advisor, first in the Graduate Program in Health Sciences: Cardiology, at the Institute of Cardiology of Rio Grande do Sul; and later at the Faculty of Medicine at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), as a Professor of the Graduate Programs in Medical Sciences/Endocrinology and Cardiovascular Sciences/Cardiology. Since then, I have published 23 articles at the Arquivos Brasileiros de Endocrinologia e Metabologia became the Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2015. The modifications proposed by our dear Marcello involved writing articles exclusively in English, and the name of the Journal gradually attracted foreign authors’ manuscripts. Nowadays, international articles represent approximately 40% of all AE&M publications.There were more surprises ahead. In 2007, me and Dr. André Reis were the invited editors of the cardiovascular disease and diabetes special issue of the AE&M. In January 2019, I was very flattered to be invited by the then Editor-in-chief, Dr. Marcello Bronstein, to be an associate editor. I already had experience in reviewing articles for many national and international journals, a laborious task, but very important, since peer review is needed to qualify research and share results with seriousness. The AE&M was at the height of its internationalization process at the time. The The AE&M has always sought to offer up-to-date content, in line with science and following the evolution of medicine, but under Marcello’s direction this process skyrocketed. Following the trailblazing steps of Edna Kimura, I am only the second woman to act as Editor-in-Chief for the journal, hoping to pave the way for several others. He invited me to replace him as Editor-in-chief a few months before passing away. Here we are, after eight years under his direction, showing off an impact factor of 2.032. It is a huge mission to carry on and I am sure I must dedicate great efforts to honor his legacy. I now count on the precious help of Bruno Ferraz-de-Souza as Deputy Editor-in-chief. The team is completed by all the dedicated co-editors, the new editorial board, the zealous staff of the Brazilian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism, and I’m confident that they are committed to this mission as I am. It was a long journey to get where we are, but it is just the beginning. We must continue the work started by Thales Martins and Waldemar Berardinelli, constantly improving the AE&M. This is our goal.


Soft matters include polymers, liquid crystals, colloids, biological tissues, and many smart materials. Weak molecular interactions make them sensitive to tiny mechanical, thermal, electric, optical, and other external stimuli. Photonic applications often require soft materials with significant or, in some cases, extreme optical dispersion and non-linear and anisotropic properties. The optical response can be structurally amplified in two fairly distinct scales that are wavelength-comparable periods of soft photonic crystals and subwavelength-graded soft photonic metamaterials.The reader is invited to explore the findings of interdisciplinary materials science research included in this Special Issue, including fresh concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and technology. This Special Issue presents ten original open-access articles, of which three are editor’s choice articles. The collection can be divided into four categories. There are two papers related to smart windows . The 3 μm thick cholesteric layer provides almost optimal coupling of chiral Tamm plasmon when reflectance falls down to 20%. Moreover, the suggested design renders both phase and polarization matching. Furthermore, by temperature-changing the center wavelength of the cholesteric band gap with different pitches, the resonance wavelength of Tamm plasmons is tuned flexibly. This phenomenon is essential for advancing technical applications in novel types of optical switches, biosensors, polariton microlasers, and mirrorless lidars.Chiral Tamm plasmon was for a long time considered as a fantastic theoretical monster because of serious experimental restrictions imposed by the polarization-preserving anisotropic mirror. Lin et al.  proudly We would like to thank all the international teams of creative intellectuals and specialists who have made this Special Issue possible. First are the authors who have kindly prepared their contributed or invited papers. In addition, we would like to thank all the peer reviewers who participated in this Special Issue for their invaluable time to offer professional and constructive comments, which definitely helped promote the quality of the scientific content of each published paper. Our gratitude is extended to the people we interacted with at MDPI for their hard work and considerate coordination throughout the entire editorial process.


Vascular Biology and are very pleased that we start this journey with an outstanding and enthusiastic new editorial board and a remarkably dedicated staff at Bioscientifica which will allow us to move forward with new initiatives to expand the journal’s impact. But not without thanking the previous Editor in Chief, Prof Paolo Madeddu, who played an important role in launching Vascular Biology as a new journal.The vasculature is an amazing network of flexible pipes connecting all organs and provide them with the necessary oxygen and nutrients needed to maintain tissue homeostasis. With a total length in the body able to circle the globe almost twice, blood vessels work as a team with the heart pumping blood through arteries, capillaries and veins. Serving the entire body, the vasculature is an exciting organ important in both health and disease. Therefore, we are very honoured to act as co-Editors in Chief of Even to this day, there is still a lot to unravel in how blood vessels function and what the impact of disease is – an exciting field of research. Insights into how cardiovascular cells read biochemical and biomechanical signals and influence their neighbouring cells and function of the vascular system is also an emerging aspect. To date, we realize that not all vessels will behave the same and not even all endothelial cells within one vascular bed will behave similarly. Therefore, advanced cellular and animal models are crucial to fully understand the biology of the vessel and draw the roadmap on how to move from bench to bed.The scope of the journal will be on broad aspects of vascular biology. These include, amongst others, single cell biology, the immune system, mechanobiology and signalling between the different cell types present within the (cardio)vascular system, which all are crucial players in the field, and also vascular (re)modelling, regeneration, calcification, animal models and alternative models, imaging technologies, biochemical and biomechanics cues affecting (cardio)vascular cells and organs.Vascular Biology is to support investigators engaged in high-impact and high-quality science in vascular biology and disease, through rigorous, fast, careful and fair peer review. This creates high value to the authors, the readers and cardiovascular scientists. Vascular Biology has focused on outstanding reviews from leaders in the field with occasional original scientific work. We now would like to put more focus on original scientific work, along with state-of-the-art reviews. Several new and exciting opportunities are planned for the coming months. We will solicit reviews or thematic issues on new science and technologies applied to vascular biology, such as those in imaging, physical sciences, engineering, cell biology, artificial intelligence and computer modelling.The principal mission of Vascular Biology papers through multiple channels. We can be certain that there will be challenges and opportunities along the way, some of which are ongoing while others will occur inevitably in the future. Current challenges are the expansion of new journals including an increasing number of online-only journals and the increasing number of predatory journals and submissions via paper mills, a big threat to academic integrity. These challenges are balanced by new opportunities to identify exciting new research through online preprint archives. Vascular Biology will continue to focus on new opportunities as we move the journal forward. This will be done in a manner that not only preserves the roots and maintains the focus of Vascular Biology but also keeps an eye towards new science and technology opportunities. In this manner, we can best support the needs of both the current and future generation of scientists and clinicians focused on vascular biology and disease.The focus on journals as an arbiter of high-quality science has been magnified by the current culture of immediate information via social media to the lay community. Therefore, we, will with Bioscientifica, regularly communicate the findings of Vascular Biology a well respected journal and a home for this field.We encourage the researchers in the cardiovascular field to submit their manuscripts and look forward to making Prof Dr Marie-Jose GoumansProf Dr Paul QuaxCo-Editors-in-Chief


Understanding the differences between academic writing genres is crucial to nailing down the craft that is writing for peer-review journal publication. Based on the experience of Ageing & Society, this presentation will bring attention to the different readers that peer-reviewed journals cater to and how these differences impact how we craft manuscripts about the research we conduct. Using this as a starting point, as well as allusions to how data collected in specific national settings can be reported so that it can be used to contribute to ongoing international debates in social gerontology, this presentation offers the Editor-in-Chief’s top 10 tips for publishing in international peer-reviewed journals. By bringing specific attention to the routines that Ageing & Society utilize, and the expectations that its editors place on the different sections of a manuscript, this presentation aims to give attendees valuable insights into how to write for peer-reviewed outlets.


Physiological Reports. I thank The Physiological Society (TPS) and the American Physiological Society (APS) for the trust placed in me. I am delighted to follow the steps of the Founding Editor, Sue Wray, and the current Editor, Tom Kleyman. I thank Tom and Sue for their wise words and encouragement on approaching the transition.It is my honor and pleasure to be appointed as the next Editor‐in‐Chief of Physiological Reports has a unique place in relation to the other journals of TPS and APS. It is a young journal that will celebrate its tenth anniversary of publication in December 2023. From its inception, it has been a fully open‐access, online journal supported by the publisher Wiley. Physiological Reports has a distinct mission to publish sound science and research papers that are accepted “on the basis of scientific rigor, adherence to technical and ethical standards, and evidence that the study is sufficiently well‐conceived and the data support the conclusions” . Beyond assessing the concept and scientific question addressed by the research, editors look for well‐defined experimental design, validation by replicate experiments, transparent figure presentation, and, where relevant, appropriate statistical analysis.Physiological Reports an intrinsically inclusive journal in terms of content. Providing the sound science criteria are met, the research advance may relate to any area of physiology and can be descriptive, correlative, confirmatory, or overlapping with prior publications, or, indeed, report negative outcomes. The authors who wish to submit novel and/or mechanistic research studies are also welcome; yet a full mechanistic explanation of the process under study is not a requirement for publication. Indeed, it is of value for authors to know that they can submit their manuscript to Physiological Reports for a rapid route to peer‐reviewed, final publication in an open‐access journal that is associated with esteemed professional societies and a major publisher. The publication of sound science papers is valuable in many ways. As a general principle, it is important that the outcomes of research, whether novel or not, should reach the public domain. More specifically, demonstrations of reproducibility are essential on the long path from basic discovery research to clinical translation. Reporting of negative results and the disproving of hypotheses support the advancement of a field by avoidance of future investigation of “dead ends” and help to focus research attention onto alternative hypotheses. Publication of novel findings for which a full mechanistic understanding is currently lacking helps authors to move on in their research and may assist with future funding applications.The emphasis on sound science makes Physiological Reports provides an efficient peer review and publication process for the authors. About 50% of manuscripts arrive by transfer from other journals of TPS and APS, Acta Physiologica published by the Scandinavian Physiological Society, or certain physiology‐related journals published by Wiley , Physiological Reports, with its remit for sound science in basic and translational physiology, is also well placed to publish papers that reflect distinct physiology research or clinical priorities from different regions of the world. We encourage such submissions and aim to be as transparent and clear as possible about the scientific requirements for achieving publication of your paper in Physiological Reports. For corresponding authors based in low‐ or lower‐middle‐income countries, the open access article processing fee should not be a deterrence to submissions because the publisher Wiley is a participant in Research4Life (https://www.research4life.org) and provides fee waivers or discounts; the authors should request these when submitting their manuscript. This fee waiver process is handled entirely by the publisher and is kept separate from the scientific peer review (https://authorservices.wiley.com/open‐research/open‐access/for‐authors/waivers‐and‐discounts.html). For authors in other countries, transformative agreements, such as Wiley's Open Access accounts with funders or institutions, may be available to cover the article processing fee in whole or in part.My vision for Physiological Reports will be in a robust position to evaluate and publish papers that reflect physiological research priorities around the world. This process has started and will continue in 2023.I am pleased to introduce a new team of Associate Editors whose collective expertise spans broad areas of physiology and who work in different regions around the world. In addition, the diversity of the Editorial Board is an important goal under the equality, diversity, and inclusion programs of APS, TPS, and Wiley. How the diversity of a Board relates to the output of publications in life sciences journals is not yet well‐understood, but a study of journals in the communications field reported that journals with more diverse Editorial Boards publish a greater diversity of research articles, based on country of origin of the research (Goyanes & Demeter, Physiological Reports can certainly achieve rapid, extensive citation. For example, the top‐cited research paper of the last 2 years (Lemes et al., Physiological Reports has offered poster prizes for early‐career researchers at key international physiology conferences. We aim to maintain this tradition as well as setting up a “Paper of the Year” award to showcase the quality and significance of the very best research published in Physiological Reports each year.Citation is a key metric of a paper's interest to its field and papers in Physiological Reports also publishes Case reports, Short Invited Reviews, and occasionally, Methods articles. Appropriate methodology is an essential component of sound science and I plan to develop the publication of Methods articles by establishing this as a separate category of paper with clear format guidelines. Once again inter‐twining the themes of journal content and journal/article visibility, the Short Review format is ideal for succinct updates on current physiological topics. We will also be looking to align suites of Reviews with current initiatives and priorities of APS and TPS. For example, TPS has an ongoing strategic goal to drive forward research and knowledge related to “Physiology and Climate Change.” Aspects of the physiology of all living organisms are susceptible to impact by climate change, and atmospheric pollution, extreme heat, and drought are already affecting the health of humans and animals. Integration between traditional disciplines in physiology, between physiologists in different countries, and between physiologists and other fields are needed for research to progress rapidly. I look forward to ensuring that Physiological Reports plays its best part in this initiative. Ongoing policy and advocacy initiatives at APS on “Animal Research” and “Reproducibility in Research” are also very relevant to the mission and content of Physiological Reports.While research articles form the majority of the papers published, Physiological Reports is very apt to the training of new reviewers and Editors through hands‐on experience. I have marked this by inclusion of early‐career independent researchers among the first new appointments to the Editorial Board and, with the support of the Associate Editors, aim to maintain a rolling annual program of early‐career researcher new appointments in the next years. The senior Editors' team will also seek opportunities to engage with the APS' “Career Gateway” and “Centre for Physiology Education” and the TPS' “Professional Development” portfolios and to champion the strong representation of reviewer and editor training materials within these online resources. We will reach out to early‐career Society Council members to identify the best ways for this career‐stage cohort to engage with Physiological Reports.The training and education missions of APS and TPS are essential to the continued vitality and rigor of research and publications in the field of physiology. The “sound science” mission of Physiological Reports in 2013, the life sciences publishing “ecosystem” has changed dramatically and continues to change. Funding body mandates for open access publication have moved from isolated examples to the norm. Pre‐print servers now offer authors an instantaneous way to publicize manuscripts online without formal peer review. A new manuscript handling process has been started at the journal eLife such that all manuscripts selected for peer review will be presented online along with peer review reports as “reviewed preprints,” removing the final step of acceptance and publication (Eisen et al., Physiological Reports stands stable as an established, fully Open access, peer‐reviewed journal that draws strength from the collaboration of two major, non‐for‐profit, professional Societies. It offers the authors and readers a trusted forum for publication and distribution of knowledge and scholarship in physiology. As 2023 gets underway, I look forward to starting the new initiatives and working with the Associate Editors and Board, the Societies, and the publisher to ensure that Physiological Reports provides the best possible service and resources to the authors and readers. Please submit your papers at https://physrep.msubmit.net. If you have ideas for Reviews, Methods topics, or Calls for Papers, please contact myself as Editor‐in‐Chief at jo.adams@bristol.ac.uk. General enquiries for submissions can be made through the Journal's dedicated email address physiologicalreports@wiley.com .Since the founding of No conflicts of interest are declared.


It is an important tradition to thank our reviewers in our December issue. The reviewers’ critical and constructive feedback greatly contributes to ensuring the quality of Perspectives on Medical Education (PME). We recognize that health professions education is a multidisciplinary field and that its scholars are invited to review for many different journals likely multiple times per month. We also acknowledge that the reviewer pool is limited because we look for the right reviewer for a manuscript’s topic, method, and scientific tradition. Therefore, we’re incredibly grateful to all the reviewers for their precious time and valuable advice which helped us to assess and improve the more than 400 manuscripts submitted in 2022.This year, we also want to thank PME’s editorial office. The people who work backstage to run the journal: Lieda Meester (our managing editor), Helen Dupuis (our language editor), Zephaniah Paulyn Reyes  and Anja Heida (our publisher). A peer review journal is a logistically complex enterprise. Manuscripts move from authors to deputy editors, associate editors, reviewers, and the deputy editor-in-chief and editor-in-chief. The editorial office manages the exchange of the manuscripts between these individuals and tries to do so as quickly as possible. They are the people who send you the gentle reminders when you’re late with your review, revisions, or decision. The logistics is only one facet of the diversity of the editorial’s office work. Other facets are issue building; copy editing; answering questions from authors, reviewers, and editors; and advising editors on these topics. The language editor works with the editor and the authors to make the article’s language more clear, coherent, and accessible.https://pmejournal.org/). We look forward to this move, but it also means that we must take leave of our amazing editorial office team. We do this with a sad heart. We are deeply grateful for everything they have done for PME.In 2023, PME will move to a new publisher: Ubiquity Press (


Dear Readers,JOR Spine has received its first impact factor (IF)—3.757! This is yet another metric that supports something we all already knew—that the JOR Spine is a top journal within the spine basic and translational research field!We are excited and very pleased to announce that We would like to thank all who supported and contributed, during these last 4 years, to reach this latest journal achievement, starting from the Editorial Board and the Reviewers who provided fast and rigorous reviews to the authors, to the authors themselves, who submitted their best and novel work to the journal. It was not easy, especially taking into consideration that the IF is still considered a major determinant when selecting which journal to submit and publish. We would also like to thank the ORS Spine Section for their dedication and constant support, with special issues and advertisement and encouraging their membership to support the journal. Last but not least, we are extremely grateful to the ORS and Wiley teams, for helping and guiding us during these exciting times. Thanks to all of you for the trust and commitment to make this happen, we appreciate and recognize your alliance to the journal—we would not be here without all of you!With this new milestone, what will change now? We expect more submissions, which will imply more commitment from all of you—the Editorial Board and Reviewers—as you are driving the quality, objectivity, fairness, and speed of the review process, the most valuable deliverables for a successful journal. We also plan to involve more and more of you, by soliciting Special Issue Editors in proposing to our readers new and exciting topics within the spine research arena. Feel free to contact us to suggest your research area recommendations. We will for sure contact you!https://www.ors.org/event/2022-ors-psrs/) where we will celebrate all together this crucial achievement and milestone for JOR Spine and build on this momentum. Again, thank you all for making this possible.Finally, we would like to invite you to attend this year's International Philadelphia Spine Research Symposium (6–10, November,


PNAS Nexus is the first fully open-access, peer-reviewed research journal to be published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the first to involve a partnership with Oxford University Press, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.The launch of a new journal is a very exciting time for any organization. The arrival of the first issue is almost as eagerly awaited as the birth of a new child, although the planning may consume much more than 9 months. However, some readers may be skeptical of the need for this new journal. After all, the internet is awash with research publications, some of questionable purpose and quality, and no doubt a few with no other rationale than to extract funds from authors. Let me assure those who hesitate to embrace this new journal that the need for it is clear.Nexus builds on the reputation of PNAS for high quality in the selection and publication of cutting-edge, high-impact research. The editorial team draws from distinguished members of the three National Academies—the NAS, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine—in addition to other experts, who will oversee a rigorous peer-review system. However, unlike PNAS, Nexus will not focus primarily on basic scientific research but will broadly encompass engineering and medical research, with a particular emphasis on the intersection (or “nexus”) of these three domains. Some of the most exciting discoveries are now being advanced through the use of convergence: “the integration of engineering, physical sciences, computation, and life sciences—with profound benefits for medicine and health, energy, and environment”  pandemic: to recommend a protocol for vaccine allocation, to confront supply chain issues, and to counter misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. It is high time that we published a journal that is able to combine the full scope of work that we do both individually and together as academies.Science magazine, we launched a fully open access sister journal, Science Advances. Like Nexus, Science Advances was broader in scope than its established sibling. Quickly this new journal established its own reputation and following. Despite only publishing a relatively small number of papers in its first partial year, three of its papers made the list of the Altmetric Top 100 that year. Its debut impact factor was the highest of any open access journal at launch, and it has steadily risen over the years. Science itself as a journal did not suffer with the addition of the new title. In fact, it might have even benefitted from authors seeing a path to have their papers sequentially considered for publication in two high-quality outlets without reformatting, given the high rejection rate for Science.While the launch of a new journal may seem like a risky endeavor for an organization as cautious as the NAS, there is proof that this approach holds promise. Years ago when I was editor-in-chief of Nexus, Karen Nelson, brings fresh ideas and a broad perspective to this new undertaking. Like PNAS, Nexus will be under the immediate oversight of the NAS Committee on Publications and indirectly under the purview of the NAS Council. I wish Dr. Nelson and the entire Nexus editorial team much success with this new undertaking and thank them for their service to the broad dissemination of cutting-edge science.Inaugural Editor-in-Chief of