As managing editor of Mammal Review, I receive and check increasing numbers of high-quality submissions and revisions, guide authors and reviewers through our double-blind peer review system, and liaise with the Mammal Society and the production team of our publisher, Wiley. Since 2006, between 11% and 54% of submitted papers have been accepted each year. I am responsible for editing every accepted paper to ensure that journal style is complied with and that papers are clear, well organized and well presented, and I read and check every proof. Mammal Review's Impact Factor (Journal Citation Reports) increased again in 2012 to 3.424 (Fig. 1), and we have a 5-year Impact Factor of 3.877. We are delighted with our ranking: 4th out of 149 zoology journals for both metrics. Already between January and early July 2013, I have processed 45 submissions, and as ever, we are grateful to our authors and reviewers for helping us provide a journal of high quality and great interest. The increasing impact factor of Mammal Review, 2000–2012. So, Mammal Review continues to be ‘on the right track’ (Hackländer 2012), though there have been some important changes in 2013, including the sad death of our inspirational former editor, Derek Yalden (Montgomery & Morris 2013). Other changes have been more positive. Firstly, we now check all papers submitted to Mammal Review for plagiarism. This helps us to ensure the quality and novelty of our papers, and also informs our selection process. Secondly, from issue 1, we updated the look of the journal and switched to a bigger format with columns on each page. We feel that the page layout is clearer, and we have more space to cope with our increasing submissions – we were able to publish 22 papers in 2013. The increased space will allow us to reduce the time between acceptance and paper publication. Thirdly, we now comply fully with the requirements of many funding bodies by offering open access publication to authors of accepted papers, via Wiley's OnlineOpen service. Authors selecting open access publication are offered a choice of creative commons licenses, and papers published in this way are immediately deposited in PubMed Central and PMC mirror sites. Authors of open access articles may themselves post the final, published version on a website, institutional repository or other free public server immediately on publication. We now also encourage authors to deposit the data underlying their manuscript in a suitable archive or repository (e.g. GenBank, Dryad) or to submit the data for publication by Mammal Review as an online-only appendix. We are making increasing use of online-only appendices (also for extended methods, lists of species, reference lists, etc.) and will follow with interest the uptake of open access publishing among authors, and its effect, if any, on our citation rates. We welcome the opportunity to make some of our papers widely and freely available to members of the public and hope that some of the data used for our published papers will be applied to research in the future.