Editorial bring in the new!

Abstract

The year 2015 has been a year for celebration when Royal Society publishing has marked the 350th anniversary of the first publication of its Philosophical Transactions, the world's first scientific journal that is still going strong (https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing350/). Open Biology, by contrast, is now an infant of a little over 4 years old but also thriving. Our aim with Open Biology was to establish an open access journal exploring biological systems at a cellular and molecular level of resolution, an area of biology that was underrepresented in the Society's existing journals. Above all, we wanted to have a journal run for cell and molecular biologists by practicing scientists that would bring first class articles to rapid publication without unnecessary rounds of review. We are making excellent progress towards this goal and Open Biology is publishing papers that are catching the attention of the community as evident from its rising impact factor (3.625 in 2012, 4.556 in 2013 and 5.784 in 2014—just one measure of a variety of journal-based metrics used by the journal to assess impact http://rsob.royalsocietypublishing.org/citation-metrics).

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