In the year that Philosophical Transactions turns 350 years old, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Biology Letters; somewhat less auspicious but nevertheless an important milestone and a proud achievement for the journal and its team.After 2 years being published as a supplement to Proceedings B from 2003 to 2005, Biology Letters published its first issue as an independent journal on 21 March 2005. In his inaugural editorial, the first Editor-in-Chief, Brian Charlesworth, looked to the future with optimism and with the objective then, as now, for Biology Letters to become a leading, if not the leading, short format, rapid publication journal for the biological sciences [1].Ten years later, we are well on our way to achieving that ambition. We now publish approximately 200 papers per year with an issue every month. Readership continues to expand apace with submissions continuing to increase year-on-year in a growing global market, a trend that is also reflected by the widening geographical spread of our authorship.We provide our authors with the best possible service in terms of speed, feedback and media promotion. We are maintaining highly competitive publication times, with our time from submission to a first decision on a manuscript averaging just 24 days in 2014, and our articles continuing to garner significant media coverage-from the observations of the spine of the hero shrew [2], through to chimpanzees using tools to retrieve food [3].Our aim to cover all the biological sciences is also being fulfilled, providing readers not only with cutting edge papers in their own fields but also providing access to innovative work being carried out across the full biological spectrum.Animal behaviour and evolutionary biology are our two most popular subject areas. The latter includes our most cited paper so far by Ericson et al.[4] on 'Diversification of Neoaves: integration of molecular sequence data and fossils' a multi-authored paper describing definitive molecular evidence for an early Tertiary diversification of bird lineages consistent with the fossil evidence. Our second most highly cited paper is currently by Keith et al. [5] in the area of global change biology on 'Predicting extinction risks under climate change: coupling stochastic population models with dynamic bioclimatic habitat models'. It was this contribution to our special feature in 2008 on 'Global change and biodiversity ' [6] that illustrated the need to understand the relationship between habitat change and population dynamics in predicting the response of species to future climate change.In addition to citations, our article downloads are rapidly increasing, with more than 1.3 million full-text downloads seen in 2014. Our all-time download record concerned a study carried out and co-authored by school children. Given the simple title of 'Blackawton bees ' [7], the study was co-ordinated by Beau Lotto from UCL's Institute of Opthalmology, but the hypotheses and experiments were devised by a class of 25 eight-to ten-year-old children who also...