As an online-only journal, securing the long-term archiving of all published articles is a central issue for Microbial Cell. In fact, scholarly knowledge represents a precious good, the preservation, protection and propagation of which needs to be ensured in the future, including beyond a publisher’s lifetime. Specifically for an electronic journal, it is vital that a version of record (VoR) is deposited at an official and independent repository. A VoR is as defined by the National Information Standards Organization, in partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, “a fixed version of a journal article that has been made available by any organization that acts as a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article ‘published’. This includes any ‘early release’ article that is formally identified as being published even before the compilation of a volume issue and assignment of associated metadata, as long as it is citable via some permanent identifier(s). This does not include any ‘early release’ article that has not yet been ‘fixed’ by processes that are still to be applied, such as copy-editing, proof corrections, layout, and typesetting.” Depositing such a VoR guarantees that any reader will have perpetual access to the unaltered content of the original publication. Microbial Cell’s VoRs are protected by our partnership with and deposition of content at the Austrian National Library and Pubmed Central (PMC). Note that articles are released on PMC upon publication of the issue, they appear in.