Together for a Shared Future

Welcome to volume 9 of Advanced Science. As always, we’d like to report a few selected highlights from the last year and also look into the future ahead of us. Already in April 2021, our team had the first opportunity to celebrate: Advanced Science was accepted for coverage in MedLine. This was an important milestone for the journal and will certainly make the journal even more attractive to our ever-growing biomedical audience. In June, the next good news followed: our new impact factor was announced to be 16.806, confirming our ambition for providing a top-quality open access platform for our authors. The paper with the largest contribution to this increase new impact factor was written by Tal Dvir from Tel Aviv University and presented 3D printed cardiac patches. Other outstanding papers and their corresponding authors can be found in Table 1. Amongst those popular contributions, you find topics from water splitting, metasurfaces, and stretchable electronics to tissue engineering (with associated cover art) and cancer immunotherapy.

Congratulations to all authors of those influential papers and thanks a lot for the trust you give to Advanced Science.
Looking back at 2021 we can say that, despite the lingering challenging circumstances the world found itself in, Advanced Science saw, against more skeptical forecasts, a successful year, driven by a strong and engaged community. In 2021 we received ca. 6000 submissions, roughly 20% more than in 2020. The journal hasn't just continued to be a popular place to publish broad scope research; papers in Advanced Science are also being noticed and read more, with a steep increase in article usage particularly in the last couple of years (Figure 1). The journal also continues to attract attention via social media and news platforms, reaching far beyond the scientific community, as we can see when looking at the articles published in 2021 with the highest Altmetrics scores (Figure 2).
In comparison with the previous year's overview, we see even a bigger outreach as high-impact multidisciplinary topics are published and shared, such as SARS-CoV-2, brain-machine interfaces, solar cells, drug delivery and immunotherapy.
To establish Advanced Science as required reading in its many represented disciplines is a continuous job. Last year, new categories were implemented during the submission process to better oversee and serve the multidisciplary community. After a full year, Figure 3 illustrates the topical landscape of the authors who choose us, with Biomedical Engineering, Diagnosis & Therapy, and Energy Storage harbouring the most articles. We will keep working on strengthening the most underrepresented fields in 2022.
A great deal of creativity is required to make scientific breakthroughs, and art is just as often an expression of (or a product of) scientific knowledge. Always inspiring, our authors brought their creativity and artistic vision to their research topics with their cover art (Figure 4).
With the ever-growing popularity of Advanced Science, hard choices have to be made and rejections of very interesting, but maybe too specialized research is inevitable. In 2021, we have therefore launched 3 new open access sister journals in particularly strong fields: Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research, Advanced NanoBiomed Research and Advanced Photonics Research. We are convinced that these titles present a very attractive alternative to Advanced Science offering all advantages of gold open access publishing and enjoying the high standards of all journals in the Advanced journal family.
In line with continuing to improve the author, reviewer, and reader experience, in Advanced Science and in its sister journals, many additional initiatives have already been carried out or will be implemented this year.
By being part of a tightly connected and expanding journals' network, your manuscript can be easily transferred, saving you time, effort, and increasing the chance of your work being published. More information on our transfer network and how it facilitates the publication of your manuscript can now be found here.
Being supported by a broad, international community, and with a strong motivation to address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we are reviewing our Editorial Advisory Boards to ensure that it better represents the community we serve. To better deliver this, our team was also reinforced, having now 23 editors and 3 supporting staff, comprising 11 different nationalities across 7 different editorial offices (Berlin, Weinheim, Shanghai, Beijing, Hoboken, Boston and Sidney).
To complement the existing virtual Issues Health Medical Life Sciences and Editor's Choice: Reviews, which are regularly updated, Advanced Science is now part of the Rising Stars Series and of the Women in Materials Science Virtual Issue alongside other Advanced-and Small-flagship journals. Research articles on studies conceptualized and supervised by recognized early career researchers from around the world as well as outstanding works created, steered, and led by women scientists are collected and highlighted in these ( Figure 5).
Y6 organic thin-film transistors with electron mobilities of 2.4 cm 2 V -1 s -1 via microstructural tuning by Edgar Gutierrez- The articles Neutralizing Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 Selected from a Human Antibody Library Constructed Decades Ago, S100A9-Targeted Cowpea Mosaic Virus as a Prophylactic and Therapeutic Immunotherapy against Metastatic Breast Cancer and Melanoma, and Enhanced Delivery of Neuroactive Drugs via Nasal Delivery with a Self-Healing Supramolecular Gel were further collected and highlighted in the Health, Medical and Life Sciences Virtual Issue. The Altmetrics score is a measure of mentions by online news outlets, blogs, and social media.  to the Rising Stars series, being part of this Issue 1, while 10 articles are currently collected and highlighted in the Women in Materials Science.

Foldable Perovskite Solar Cells Using Carbon Nanotube-Embedded Ultrathin Polyimide Conductor
Additionally, as a way of highlighting outstanding work, Editor's' Choice has been implemented across the whole Advanced series and other sister journals for Research Articles. These ar-ticles are selected based on recommendations by the reviewers and editors and reflect the significance of their results. Fine-Tuning of Cholesterol Homeostasis Controls Erythroid Differentiation by Lu et al. is the first article published in Advanced Science to receive this tag and we are looking forward to many more highlights.  Without knowing when meeting you face-to-face can be realistically achieved, we are currently planning an exciting online event with our new sister journal Small Science in March. Stay tuned for more details.
Last but not least, a wholehearted thank you-to our authors, reviewers, Advisory Board members, and readers. We look forward to more exciting publications in the upcoming year and the whole team wishes you a happy, healthy, and successful 2022 (Figure 6)! And please let us know if you have any feedback, ideas, or suggestions -we are committed to keep on improving and to continue to be your journal of choice.
On behalf of the whole team, Kirsten Severing and Ana V. Almeida