Welcome 2021 – Welcome 10 th Volume!
Authors: Uta Goebel
Journal: Advanced Healthcare Materials (2021)

I am writing this editorial from my home office in Weinheim, in the middle of my family preparing for Christmas: decorating, baking, and listening to loud Christmas songs. This year more than ever we are trying to bring some light into this dark season, and we are looking forward to bringing the disturbing and long year, 2020, to a close. In this time, still in the middle of the global pandemic, we all realize how important health is. Therefore, I am also proud to be working for a journal within healthcare, aiming at making research public, driven by getting developments of basic research to patients suffering from disease and trauma. These days I am amazed how quickly vaccine development can be when there is one over-arching goal. The pandemic is thus also accelerating biomedical research and is a driver to get new technologies to the public, such as the rather new RNA-based vaccines. I am also certain the pandemic will boost developments within health-related materials science and nanotechnology, bringing for example diagnostic tools and nanomaterials-based vaccination strategies closer to the clinic. Interestingly, while most countries experienced some kind of a lock-down situation, which also affected research labs globally, we do not see a decline in submissions and can celebrate record submission across publishers (see analysis in the recent Scholarly Kitchen post “Guest Post – Scientific output in the year of COVID” by Christos Petrou). Advanced Healthcare Materials (AHM) is no exception here, and of course also being driven by a new impact factor of 7.367, we can celebrate having received more than 2000 submissions in 2020 for the first time in this journal's history. AHM special issues in 2020: Special Issue: Biomaterials in Mechanobiology, edited by Jason A. Burdick and Andrés J. García Special Issue: Biomaterial Inks, edited by Yu Shrike Zhang AHM special issues in 2020: Special Issue: Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine, edited by Shengmin Zhang and Antonios G. Mikos Special issue: Biofabrication 2019, edited by David Dean and Ciro Rodriguez In addition to these AHM-specific activities in 2020, we are also happy to celebrate another milestone for the Advanced family of journals: Advanced is going open access! Following the success of our broad scope journal, Advanced Science, our team has launched three new fully gold open access journals in photonics, energy and sustainability research, and in nano- and biomedicine. Advanced NanoBiomed Research is not only aimed at capturing the growing content in nanomedicine and nanotechnology, but also the emerging studies we receive in biomedicine that are too translational for our usual materials science portfolio. So, do not be surprised if we suggest a transfer to this journal from the Advanced family of journals, but expect this new journal to become another top member in the biomaterials and biodevices field. APCs are still being waived in early 2021. Find out more at https://www.advnanobiomedres.com In 2021, we are also very happy to celebrate AHM's 10th volume. Almost exactly ten years ago, the editorial team of Advanced Materials announced the launch of Advanced Healthcare Materials as a section in the journal,[1] giving rise to a “A Healthy Start to 2012” a year later with the first issue of AHM as an independent journal.[2] While we are not sure yet whether there can be any physical celebrations (including cakes) this year, we will also make sure this milestone does not go unnoticed. Many of AHM's current editorial board members have agreed to contribute a review article reflecting on the last decade of biomaterials research, which will be published in a virtual issue throughout this year. In addition, we are planning dedicated activities to promote young biomaterial scientists. So, watch our journal homepage as well as Advanced Science News for highlighted content. Finally, another thing which I realized during the pandemic, while working alone in my home office almost the entire year, is the importance of connecting with people. Thus, I acknowledge all our authors for publishing their work in AHM, knowing about the hours spent in the lab to produce publishable data and additional hours in getting this into a paper format. Thanks to all the numerous reviewers, who help us to maintain the high standards of the journal and without whom we would be unable to select and improve the work published with us. We are grateful for our readers, who show us every day by downloads and citations, that our content is valuable and is bringing the biomaterials community forward. We are also expressing gratitude for the support of our editorial board, especially the chairman, Younan Xia. In addition, the journal would not be where it is today without the people working on it every day: deputy editors Emily Hu based in Beijing and Irem Bayindir-Buchhalter, based in our Weinheim office, as well as the other peer review editors Conor Doss (working in Baltimore), Ulrike Kauscher Pinto (also in Weinheim), and Wei Xu and Jing Zhu (located in Shanghai). No article would appear online without our committed technical editors, Kieran O'Brien, with Julia Abel-Ranzinger and Samantha Catt, as well as production editor Christine Herth. Last but not least, we also send special thanks to our administration team, most importantly Melanie Rettenmaier. Finally, we thank the awesome Material Science and Physics Department, now lead by former AHM Editor-in-Chief José Oliveira, for being great colleagues and friends. Today, more than in any other year, we are wishing you a healthy 2021! Uta Goebel, Editor-in-Chief P.S.: With the Virtual World Biomaterials Congress 2020 (WBC2020) happening at the close of 2020, we have selected the best biomaterials papers within the Advanced and Small family of journals. We hope you enjoy reading them: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)2192-2659.WBC2020-Advanced-Biomaterials