As noted in an editorial published earlier this year (Smol 2007a) announcing the appointment of Mark Brenner as the new co-editor of the Journal of Paleolimnology (JOPL), I will be stepping down as editor of JOPL on December 31, 2007. Several colleagues have kindly asked me how I felt about leaving JOPL after so many years. Of course, there will be many things that I will miss about the journal and my interaction with so many interesting people. However, I leave the editor’s chair content that ‘‘my job has been done’’, at least as well as I could have done it. Looking back at my opening JOPL editorial (Smol 1988), I feel we have met and surpassed the goals set out for the journal at that time. A simple perusal of any recent volume will show that it includes a wide spectrum of excellent papers using diverse approaches from all parts of the globe. I am especially proud of JOPL’s leading role in fostering the inter-disciplinary nature of paleolimnology, and thereby helping to define our discipline. I am convinced that the journal, like the field of paleolimnology itself, will continue to thrive and serve the greater scientific community. I am especially pleased that Mark Brenner has agreed to take on the editorship—it is impossible to have more confidence in a future editor than the confidence and admiration that I have for Mark. I fully expect wonderful things for JOPL and its contributors in the future. Paleolimnologists tend to look backwards in time. As I look at my tenure as JOPL editor, which appears to have covered most of my adult life (!), my first thought is how quickly the time has gone by. It is hard to believe that I started this job 21 years ago. In an editorial celebrating our 20 years of publication (Smol 2007b), I highlighted some of the journal’s history and progress since its inception. We have seen remarkable changes over those two decades—starting with different means of communication (for example, most people were not even using email when the journal started), to differences in publishing production procedures (going from typesetting, to computergenerated figures, to submitting accepted manuscripts on computer disks, to electronic publishing, to webbased submission and editing), and of course to major changes in the field of paleolimnology itself. Most importantly, the content and visibility of the journal (in step with the science of paleolimnology) has improved by leaps and bounds over the intervening two decades. I again wish to emphasize the pivotal role played by Bill Last (co-editor from 1993 to 2006) in the journal’s success. By any independent measure, including citation statistics, journal index values, or simply the very impressive data from the Springer website showing how many researchers download our papers, it is clear that JOPL is no J. P. Smol (&) Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Lab (PEARL), Department of Biology, Queen’s University, 116 Barrie St., Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6 e-mail: smolj@queensu.ca