Another landmark year has passed. The journal has gained Hans Hoppeler as its sixth Editor-in-Chief while sadly saying goodbye to Malcolm Burrows, who served as a dedicated editor for more than ten years. Malcolm will be greatly missed by all who worked with him, but we are fortunate that Ken Lukowiak, a long-standing member of the JEB community, has agreed to join the team of editors in Malcolm's stead and will continue Malcolm's work with many authors from the field of neurobiology. While the journal has seen many editorial changes during the last twelve months, the production office has also seen some new appointments. Production Editor Michaela Handel and News and Views Editor Kathryn Phillips both began periods of maternity leave in late 2004 and have been temporarily replaced by Rachel Wood and Yfke van Bergen. However,despite the many changes at all levels throughout the journal, Margaret Clements continued to oversee peer review, and the journal continued to be published seamlessly.
Hopefully 2005 will see the journal entering a more peaceful period, and with this, the Editors would like to announce the launch of `The Bob Boutilier Memorial Best Paper Prize', to acknowledge annually the most outstanding scientific contribution to the journal. The award of £500 will be made to the first author of the paper judged by the journal's editors to be the most outstanding contribution to the field of integrative biology, published in the JEB. All papers published in 2005 will be eligible for consideration,and the winner announced in the final issue of the year.
Other advances at the journal include the development of a new facility on the journal's website, which allows users to automatically download PowerPoint slides of all of the figures published in the journal since the new website was launched in 2001. Every slide will be delivered intact with a title and reference, and can be easily slotted into your next presentation or lecture,taking all the effort out of downloading figures from the website and importing them into PowerPoint. All you have to do is click on the figure in the paper to go to the figure's webpage, and then click the `PowerPoint slide for teaching' button, which will download the slide in approximately 30 seconds. We hope you will find this facility useful.
We are also looking forward to the launch of the JEB Archive online at the journal's HighWire website. Every paper that the journal has ever published will be available as a scanned pdf file, and will be accessible to all users free of charge. So keep watching for announcements of this new and exciting development some time in 2005.
