A look back at our first year
Authors: Sara Hamilton, Isabel Goldman, Kristan van der Vos, Sha Yu, Yixin Yao
Journal: Cell Reports Medicine (2021)

Welcome to the 1-year anniversary of Cell Reports Medicine! It was against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic and the additional challenges it brought that Cell Reports Medicine launched last year. I wrote the editorial for our first issue in the early weeks of lockdown. A year later, I have not moved far physically (from my kitchen table to a more functional home “office”); however, the journal has come a long way, touching some major milestones over the course of the year. As a new journal, we had to start by building our editorial team. We are now a team of five editors located in Cambridge, Amsterdam, and Shanghai. Working from our kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, and even attics, we faced the same challenges you in our communities did. We, too, have isolated and worked around and through childcare while concerned about the health of friends and families. We have had to find new ways to work and connect with each other (most of us have never actually met face-to-face!), which required patience and flexibility. Despite these challenges, we built a strong team that embraced an ethos of adaptability and collaboration, which will serve us well once we are back in our respective offices and traveling again to meet our authors and reviewers while learning about the fields in which we publish. Our first year has taught us a lot, and we have many people to thank for helping us get here. First, we want to thank all our authors. As I said previously, it takes an adventurous spirit to submit to a new journal, and we are grateful that you took a chance on us. Over our first year, we published a total of 115 original research articles and reviews with authors from 48 different countries (Figure 1). Almost 2,000 authors can now say that they have published in Cell Reports Medicine! Your science is the backbone of the journal, and we are humbled by your contributions and support. Second, we would like to highlight and thank our Advisory Board members. Our Advisory Board has grown to 40 scientists from around the globe, ranging from early career researchers to senior faculty. We have leaned on them for expert advice, relying on them to help guide Cell Reports Medicine. Our launch would not have been successful without them, and we will continue to ask for their support and rely on their experience and advice. Third, we thank our reviewers. On top of your already large workloads, you have taken on the task of reviewing papers for us, answering our questions and providing comments that helped our decisions and improved the manuscripts we published. It’s true that without authors, we wouldn’t have manuscripts. But without peer reviewers, we wouldn’t have published manuscripts. Your work is an indispensable, yet often invisible, part of a paper’s journey. We appreciate it and you. We also want to thank all of you that have downloaded and read our published papers. After all, what is a journal without readers! At the time of this writing, individuals located in over 200 different countries have downloaded our papers approximately 550,000 times. You have cited our papers and discussed them on Twitter and Zoom, and the news has covered them as well. These interactions and conversations breathe life into a journal. The scientific conversation does not cease when we publish a manuscript. Rather, it begins anew as you ask questions, offer insights and answers, and suggest further research. Through this ongoing discourse, manuscripts we publish today becomes stepping-stones that create a path over which good science find its way to become our next submissions. Lastly, beyond our editorial team lies a broader group that handles the operations, production, and marketing of Cell Reports Medicine. Without this broader Cell Reports Medicine family, there would not be a 1-year anniversary. The editorial team is indebted to our colleagues who take a collection of papers and turn them into an issue that people read, discuss, and cite each and every month. Thank you for all your work. We originally commissioned the art featured on this cover in late 2019. At the time, we wanted an image that represented our goal of building a journal that would serve as a home for important advances in translational and clinical research—one that shows the collaboration between these research communities. In the end, we used a different cover image that was the work of one of our own editors, Kristan van der Vos (Figure 2). However, a year later, the original cover art resurfaced. Now, we find it perfectly encapsulates our first year . The two collaborating hands represent the translational and clinical research communities, without whom we would not be here. But the image also reminds us of COVID-19 and global vaccination efforts, topics that have dominated our lives personally and professionally throughout our first year. Therefore, using this artwork seems fitting, as there is perhaps no better example of the importance of collaboration and shared commitment to health and society than the incredible work and effort that has gone into combating SARS-CoV-2. To have come so far in such a short period of time is a testament to what we can achieve when unified toward a common goal. With that, we invite all of you to celebrate with us the first year of Cell Reports Medicine, as well as the progress our communities have made toward ending the pandemic.