Proceedings B 2016: the year in review.

Proceedings B continues to maintain its strong reputation as one of the leading organismal biology journals in the world. During 2016, we upheld our practice of rapid publication of high quality articles that are of broad interest in the biological sciences. This year, articles took on average 78 days to final acceptance and the mean time from date of submission to first decision was just 32 days, reinforcing Proceedings B's well-deserved reputation for rapid and efficient peer review while maintaining high editorial standards. Our citation metrics remain competitive with an impact factor of 4.8 and the journal is ranked 9th in the Journal Citation Reports category for 'Biology', has a SCImago Journal Rank of 2.375, and a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 1.269. This year Proceedings B, along with other Royal Society journals, included a citation distribution graph on the journal website in order to more transparently display the range of citations to articles published in the journal. It is encouraging to see that several other publishers have now followed this example and included this information on their own journal pages. However, this is no time for complacency with new journals springing up annually, many in direct competition with Proceedings B, and in 2017 we will continue to work hard to attract to the journal the most exciting and novel research in the biological sciences. Proceedings B has implemented a number of new initiatives in the last year to ensure that we remain at the forefront of scientific publishing and continue to provide the highest possible service for our authors, reviewers and readers. We have continued our association with Publons, which allows our reviewers to gain recognition and credit for the work that they undertake for us. As of November 2016, when this editorial was written, over 750 reviews have been uploaded to the Publons site, and almost 20% of reviewers for the journal have opted into using this service since the integration went live in September 2015. In January, we brought in a new policy requiring submitting authors to register for an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifier and to use it at submission. ORCIDs supply a unique identifier for authors, distinguishing individual researchers across multiple platforms. In September 2016, we announced a new integration with figshare. For several years, electronic supplementary files published alongside articles in Proceedings B have been published Open Access, and integrating …