A new year is with us again and Open Biology moves forward to meet new challenges in the ever-changing world of scientific publishing. Hopefully, we manage to keep the best of the old while keeping abreast of the new

Glover, David M.

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royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsobEditorial
Cite this article: Glover DM. 2019 2018: a
year in review for Open Biology. Open Biol. 9:
190015.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsob.190015& 2019 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original
author and source are credited.2018: a year in review for Open Biology
David M. Glover
University of Cambridge, UK
DMG, 0000-0003-0956-0103A new year is with us again and Open Biology moves forward to meet new chal-
lenges in the ever-changing world of scientific publishing. Hopefully, we
manage to keep the best of the old while keeping abreast of the new.
We are still managing to turn papers around with some speed. In 2018, the
average time from submission to first decision was 30 days, and then it took an
average of 25 days to get from the final decision to online publication. Why use
a preprint server? Although we are equally happy if you do and are happy to
sign articles from the popular servers, we hope that all of this makes our
authors happy. Our readers are! In 2018, Open Biology articles received their
highest usage to date with over 1.1 million downloads.
In the past few years, we have encouraged the submission of review articles
from leaders in their fields. The response has been tremendous, and our review
articles have become one of the hallmarks of the journal. We particularly encou-
rage review articles that generate innovative and testable ideas and constructive
discussions and/or critiques of their fields. In 2018, 62 invited reviews were
submitted and 48 have already been published—almost double the 25 from
2017. The rest will follow shortly and be enhanced by the articles that are in
the pipeline. We see this as an important role for the journal in providing a
forum that stimulates the circulation and discussion of up-to-date results in
developing fields in the widest possible way.
The journal is partnered with Altmetric which tracks the number of times
articles are mentioned in the news, on blogs and in social media. Each Open
Biology article features an ‘Altmetric donut’ in the Details tab. Some of the high-
est Altmetric scores include a perspective article on predicting virus emergence
[1], a research paper on the role of a ‘molecular switch’ in Parkinson’s Disease
[2], a review on epichromatin and chromomeres [3] and developments in cancer
immunotherapy [4].
It is not only our review articles that are catching attention. Notably, two
articles also on rapamycin in fission yeast from the groups of Mitsuhiro Yana-
gida [5] and Janni Petersen [6] have stimulated lots of interest and led to
additional articles on the subject. Two papers exploring unusual links between
cancer and placental development on the one hand [7] and malaria on the other
[8], have also caught a lot of attention.
There are some new developments in the journal in the past year that I must
report. One of these is to compile papers into special interest group collections.
One dear to my own heart is a Special Collection on Centrosome Biology. We
have an open call for papers for this special collection of articles focused on
the biology of the centrosome. By pulling our papers together, not only in
monthly issues but also in topic groups, we aim to highlight exciting work in
particular fields and in this example, improve knowledge on centrosome func-
tion, evolution and abnormalities. We aim to publish the centrosome full
collection later in the Summer 2019.
In a similar vein, in February 2019, we will publish a mini collection of
reviews in collaboration with neuroscientists based at the National Academy
of Taiwan, Academia Sinica. The Academy celebrated its 90th anniversary in
2018, and this is also the 10th anniversary of their Neuroscience Program. We
are delighted to put together this collection of articles to commemorate these
anniversaries.
royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsob
Open
Biol.9:190015
2We are actively exploring numerous ways to distribute
data and methods. Open Biology has partnered with BioStu-
dies, a database of the European Bioinformatics Institute
(EMBL-EBI) that collects all the data about a study in one
place. Since the pilot in September 2017, 20% of authors
have made their data accessible through a data package. It
is in the year 2018 we introduced a reproducibility checklist
for authors to complete during the submission process
which will help to encourage transparency and reproducibil-
ity of data and experiments. The form is available alongside
the manuscript.
We also have a new author feedback tool from Publons.
This is a new feature which allows out authors to rate the
quality of the feedback that they receive from reviews and
also give them the opportunity to recognize those peer
reviewers who have made an exceptional effort to improve
the quality of their work. We recommend researchers to
sign up to Publons keep a validated track-record of contri-
butions across all journals they contribute to.
Royal Society Publishing is now on WeChat and we
encourage any academics based in China to follow us andengage with our content using our QR code. Our marketing
team will regularly post videos, articles and news from the
whole of our portfolio of journals in order to reach as wide
an audience as possible. If you use WeChat, please do let
us know what you think about our account.
The Royal Society regards publishing as one of its impor-
tant objectives in order to make our findings as scientists as
widely available as possible. We ask for your support to
Open Biology and the other journals of the society to reach
this objective. I am grateful for so much support; from my
fellow editors Christine Holt, Marek Mlodzik and Peter
Parham; from our hard-working international editorial
board; and for all the referees who have helped us in the
past year. Above all my thanks go to Buchi Okereafor at
Royal Society Publishing for her constant attention to the
journal and to me and to my review article secretary, Kseniya
Tyshkevych, for her endless patience and her tireless
contributions.
We hope to see your article submitted to Open Biology in
2019 and wish you and all our readers a prosperous new year
with lots of exciting new discoveries.References1. Geoghegan JL, Holmes EC. 2017 Predicting
virus emergence amid evolutionary noise.
Open Biol. 7, 170189. (doi:10.1098/rsob.
170189)
2. McWilliams TG et al. 2018 Phosphorylation of
Parkin at serine 65 is essential for its activation
in vivo. Open Biol. 8, 180108. (doi:10.1098/rsob.
180108)
3. Olins DE, Olins AL. 2018 Epichromatin and
chromomeres: a ‘fuzzy’ perspective. Open Biol. 8,
180058. (doi:10.1098/rsob.180058)4. van den Bulk J, Verdegaal EME, de Miranda NFCC.
2018 Cancer immunotherapy: broadening the scope
of targetable tumours. Open Biol. 8, 180037.
(doi:10.1098/rsob.180037)
5. Sajiki K et al. 2018 Genetic defects in SAPK
signalling, chromatin regulation, vesicle transport
and CoA-related lipid metabolism are rescued by
rapamycin in fission yeast. Open Biol. 8, 170261.
(doi:10.1098/rsob.170261)
6. Lie S, Banks P, Lawless C, Lydall D, Petersen J. 2018
The contribution of non-essentialSchizosaccharomyces pombe genes to fitness in
response to altered nutrient supply and target of
rapamycin activity. Open Biol. 8, 180015. (doi:10.
1098/rsob.180015)
7. Costanzo V, Bardelli A, Siena S, Abrignani S. 2018
Exploring the links between cancer and placenta
development. Open Biol. 8, 180081. (doi:10.1098/
rsob.180081)
8. Nordor AV, Bellet D, Siwo GH. 2018 Cancer –
malaria: hidden connections. Open Biol. 8, 180127.
(doi:10.1098/rsob.180127)


2018: a year in review for Open Biology

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2018: a year in review for Open Biology

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