Molecular Ecology continues to perform well. It was the second largest evolutionary biology journal (392 articles) in 2016 according to ISI Web of Knowledge, and had the sixth highest citation impact factor (6.1). In terms of overall impact, Molecular Ecology ranks second among ecology or evolution journals according to Google Scholar's h5-index, which rates journals by cumulative hindex over the past five years. Our push to streamline the review process over the past year has begun to pay off, and the time to decision on original manuscript submissions averaged 30 days in 2017.We continue in our efforts to enhance the experience of our authors. Wiley has introduced a new page design for Molecular Ecology, which has been optimized for the online environment. Our website has been updated and reformatted to increase usability, and our Author Guidelines have been updated in a format intended to be less "text dense" for our authors. In addition, the scope statement for the journal now appears in both English and Chinese, as we strive to be more welcoming to our Chinese authors.In October 2017, we were most pleased to welcome a dedicated Editorial Assistant, David Crespo, to the Molecular Ecology staff. Many of you may have heard from him already as he manages the molecol email box and patrols our Scholar One Manuscript Central site. Thus, we expect that the editorial office will be able to respond more quickly to author questions and concerns in 2018. | AN NOUNCEMEN TS | Molecular ecology prizeThe 2017 Molecular Ecology Prize has been awarded to Professor Nancy Moran for her pioneering studies of symbiosis and bacterial genome evolution. The Prize is awarded annually to "an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to molecular ecology," as selected by an independent award committee. A biography of Nancy and her contributions to the field of molecular ecology can be found on pages XX-XX of this issue. | The Harry Smith prizeAt the Molecular Ecology editorial meeting this summer, we decided to offer a new prize to that would recognize the best paper published in Molecular Ecology by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. As with the Molecular Ecology Prize, the winner of this annual prize will be selected by an independent award committee. A call for nominations will be made in spring, 2018.The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded the journal and served as both its Chief and Managing Editor during the journal's critical early years. He continued as the journal's Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world's foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as "neighbour detection" and "shade avoidance," which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly, his research provided an ear...

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