All the best for 3 × 11 × 61!

Abstract

Against popular movies and esoteric believes, the year 2012 did not mark the end of our world. It was a strong year for Laser & Photonics Reviews as it kept its position among the best two optics journals according to Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports®. Following our tradition, in 2012 many strong articles were published in our journal and most of them already received a lot of citations (see [1a–c] for the three top cited articles published in 2012). We frequently offer content for free, either in form of editor's choice articles or because authors decide to have their article published as open access publication 2. This trend has increased and is well received by the community and evident by a growing number of downloads of the respective articles. There seems to be a strong correlation between PDF downloads and free content, see list of top 5 downloaded articles from 2012 3. All articles listed here have been made freely available at least for a period of time. Thinking back I truly believe that it was an important year for Laser & Photonics Reviews as it opened up for new article formats: Communications! The first letter article was published online on June 28, 2012 4, shortly followed by the first original paper on June 29 5. This change in publishing policy was accompanied by an expansion of our Editorial Advisory Board which we believed was required to properly respond to the increased manuscript submissions. We are grateful for the support of our new members Philippe Lalanne (France), Sune Svanberg (Sweden), Luc Thévenaz (Switzerland), and Niek van Hulst (Spain), and we welcome Jeremy J. Blaumberg (UK) and John T. Fourkas (USA) who start supporting us from beginning of this year. Besides the addition of the communications it should be stressed that the procedure for review articles has not changed. Although we encourage authors to consider Laser & Photonics Reviews for publishing their review articles, it is strongly recommended to contact the editors prior to manuscript preparation or at least prior to the final submission. It is through an early exchange of ideas that a smooth processing can be ensured and disappointments avoided. Laser & Photonics Reviews uses a pre-screening process to select those manuscripts that fit best to the journal scope and to its position among the top optics journals. Now turning to 2013 – I haven't yet heard about an apocalyptic scenario for this year (maybe this is due the fact that it is not even a prime number as shown in the title). This year will be exciting, too. We will see a special issue on Biophotonics organized by our new board member Sune Svanberg, as well as some featuring of Chinese works supervised by Sailing He. We will continue to include communications in the form of original papers and letter articles. As we do not change the issue frequency I feel urged to stress that all articles – not just letters – will be published online well ahead of print and citable via their DOI identifier. Letter articles are still special as they have an extra page numbering starting with “L”, e.g. page L1-L4. This enables us to include letters at short notice when the issue compilation has nearly been finished and the printer press is already warming up for performing its duty. Last but not least, I wish you a healthy and successful year 2013! Keep on enjoying our journal and don't forget to submit your latest top findings to Laser & Photonics Reviews! * = temporary free access