Future Science OA | 2019
Welcome to volume 5 of Future Science OA
Abstract
Welcome to the first issue of volume 5 from Future Science OA! We are delighted to be celebrating our fifth birthday this year, which will also see us surpass 400 publications. In this Foreword, I will take a look back over our highlights from 2018, and look forward to what we have planned in 2019. 2018 has seen us continue to disseminate our content in the traditional ways, as well as the novel. We now see 6% of our readers come through social media, which is a threefold increase on 2017. Furthermore, 2018 saw us partner with ScienceOpen, the research and publishing network. All Future Science OA content is now available in a ScienceOpen collection [1]. Here, you can find all of our articles and view some of their metrics. One of our favorite parts of ScienceOpen is the ability to view the reference list of each article in detail, meaning it is easy to find the most relevant, related content to continue your research. We also supported the second iteration of the Future Science Early Career Research Award [2]. This year saw us receive 19 nominations, from which a shortlist of five finalists was selected by our expert judging panel. The panel this year comprised members of our Editorial Board and Young Ambassador panel, including Joe Abisambra, the winner of the 2017 award. Viviana Mucci was then announced as the winner following a public vote, which saw over 4000 voters choose their winner [3]. We recommend reading her profile as she is doing some fabulous work. With gender equality in the sciences continuing to be an important topic of discussion, we were delighted to see that all five finalists were outstanding female early career researchers – this bodes well for the future. We have also been supporting researchers even earlier in their careers this year. The ChrisXandDrake Science Award is an initiative that promotes science in primary schools [4]. This year, the initiative and a team of researcher mentors took 9to 10-year-old school children through the scientific investigation process, from hypothesisbuilding through study design to data collection, write-up and publication. We were delighted to attend their poster presentation event, and have since published their write-ups in Future Science OA [5]. It was wonderful to see children learning more about the research process, and a delight to hear them talking about their future plans for careers in scientific research.