With the January 2016 issue, we celebrate Microbial Cell‘s 25th issue. Since it first appeared in January 2014, the journal has received more than a 100.000 page visits from more than 150 different countries. Notably, page visits have incremented by 50% between 2014 and 2015, demonstrating that Microbial Cell‘s visibility is rapidly increasing. In the course of these two years, Microbial Cell has received around 150 manuscript submissions from authors of all continents around the globe. The evaluation of these submissions was supported by the expertise of hundreds of referees across the world.

We have published more than a 100 articles, which are starting to be cited by the research community. The top 5 cited papers published in Microbial Cell, so far (according to Google Scholar), are: Arlia-Ciommo et al., Teixeira et al., Peleh et al., Spincemaille et al., and Scheidt et al. Finally, we have received groundbreaking reports and outstanding reviews from world-leading scientists, including articles by the groups around Alexander Varshavsky, Gerry Shadel, Chris Meisinger, Ed Calabrese, Dimitrios Kontoyiannis, Ida van der Klei, or Guido Kroemer, among others.

In the course of this freshly started 2016, Microbial Cell will apply for inclusion in Thomson/Reuters and PubMed Central. We are looking forward to draw our next balance, at the latest when we celebrate our 50th issue together with our authors, editors, referees, and readers.