Editorial

Abstract

The past year has been a time of some change at Proceedings B. We have had to say goodbye to our Senior Publishing Editor, Vicki Millen, who had been steering the journal since 2008 and has now moved on to be SpringerOpen Journal Manager at BioMed Central. Vicki did a wonderful job for the journal and we wish her all the best with her new position. With pleasing symmetry, her successor, Emilie Aimé, has come to the Royal Society from BioMed Central. She has very quickly learnt the ropes, and it is clear that the journal continues to be in very good hands.2013 was again a very successful year for Proceedings B. At the time of writing, our new submissions for the year are projected to be about 3400, an increase of about 10% over the previous year. A corollary of this is that our rejection rate is very high (around 84% of all submissions, with 54% rejected prior to review) and we must unfortunately reject many good and interesting papers. The journal's citation metrics have continued to improve, with Impact Factor and 5 year Impact Factor now at 5.68 and 5.83, respectively, making the journal eighth out of 83 in the biology category of ISI. The journal's EigenFactor is 0.09097, putting us second out of 83 in the biology category of ISI and the journal's immediacy index is 1.22. Full details of our current metrics can be found on the journal website (Proceedings B citation metrics http://rspb.royal societypublishing.org/site/misc/metrics.xhtml). One more statistic: our turnaround time remains impressively fast with the time to first decision at 34 days (33 days in 2012).In an important development, Royal Society Publishing has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). This declaration challenges the role played by the Impact Factor as the main means for evaluating science and promotes the assessment of research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published. For this reason, the Royal Society will, in future, present our journal Impact Factors within the context of a variety of journal-based metrics (as above). I feel that by emphasizing several different metrics in this way, we can provide a richer view of journal performance than is currently the case.This year we have introduced a new category of revision in our review process that we hope will make life easier for our authors and ensure our peer review times are more transparent. Called 'Revise', it will sit between our categories of 'Accept with Minor Revision' and 'Reject and Allow Resubmission'. In a few words, when Editors use this decision, authors will be given three weeks to submit a revision addressing reviewers' and Editors' concerns. The revision will be assessed by an Associate Editor who will either recommend a final decision at this stage or send the revision back to the original reviewers for comment, if necessary.During 2013, we published a special feature on molecular clocks, 'Animal Clocks: When Science meets Nature', guest edited by Prof. Bill Schwarz (website: Animal clocks...