Happy 5th Birthday Biology Open

The first issue of Biology Open (BiO) was published by The Company of Biologists, the long-established not-for-profit publishing organisation, in January 2012. The first article? An Editorial from our Editor-in-Chief outlining how BiO was going to reduce the pain to publish and make “life easier for us all” (Raff, 2012). In 2017, we celebrate five years of BiO (Fig. 1). So, six volumes, more than 60 issues and nearly 1000 published fully Open Access articles later, has BiO achieved its aims? BiO was launched with an easy one-click online transfer system for authors whose papers were rejected by one of The Company of Biologists’ other journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology and Disease Models & Mechanisms. Transfer does not require reformatting and authors also have the opportunity to revise their article in response to any transferred reviews. In addition, BiO has a similar transfer agreement in place with the journal eLife. It is, of course, also possible to submit articles directly to BiO; ∼50% of our authors do so. In April of this year, BiO joined the other Company of Biologists, journals in launching format-free submission to reduce the pain to submit for all our authors. We accept any format of paper (with references in any style) and ask you to do only what is absolutely necessary at submission. In practice, this means that other requirements will move to the revision stages – but we hope you won’t mind at this point, given that we accept over 95% of revised manuscripts. As part of this change, and recognising the importance of reporting comprehensive materials and methods to aid transparency and reproducibility, we have removed the Materials and Methods section from our length limit to an article. BiO considers useful reports of negative results, but authors don’t tend to submit them; perhaps busy researchers prioritise other papers? It’s not just authors who benefit from BiO. Articles transferred with existing reviews usually avoid the need for further rounds of review. This system speeds up editorial decisions and reduces the number of reviewers involved in the reviewing of such papers – reducing so-called ‘reviewer fatigue’ (Hunt and Moulton, 2012). For articles sent for review, BiO’s streamlined review procedures are simple, fast, ethical and rigorous. Moreover, reviewers are asked not to suggest additional experiments unless these are absolutely necessary to support the main conclusions of the paper. Speed has always been a focus for BiO, and is frequently reviewed and processes honed. Time to first decision is a key concern of authors. We have found speed of peer review the most difficult to improve, with busy reviewers struggling to meet the seven-day deadline. This leaves the Editor with a dilemma; wait for the existing reviewer or try someone else who may or may not be quicker or more appropriate. We’re confident our Editors make the right decisions in most of these cases; BiO is quicker than its sister journals and key competitors, especially for articles transferred with reviews, but we are always striving for further improvement. And what about speed after acceptance? To date, for 2017, the author’s accepted version of their article appears online on average seven days after acceptance, with 38 days from acceptance to publication in an issue. And we will get faster too – in 2018, BiO moves to continuous publication, with the final versions of articles being published online as soon as they are ready, without having to wait for publication in a scheduled issue. Since its launch, BiO has strived to keep abreast of developments in the fast-moving field of STM (science, technology, medicine) Fig. 1. Editor-in-Chief Jordan Raff celebrates BiO’s birthday at the British Society for Cell Biology/British Society for Developmental Biology meeting in April 2017.