LAUSR

This has been an exciting year for Weed Science. For the past year, we have been transitioning from Allen Press to Cambridge University Press. This will be our first issue with Cambridge University Press. The journal will go from four to six issues per year and will be online only. One of the benefits of being online only will be that we no longer will charge for color photographs or figures, so I would encourage authors to use more color in their submissions. The manuscript submission process should be seamless for authors, as we are still using the underlying software that was present in PeerTrack, it will now just be referred to as Editorial Manager. One last change that authors will see will be in early-view articles. Instead of the submitted manuscript being posted online after acceptance, Weed Science will post the completed article (known as the Version of Record) in the First View section. This will be the final article minus the page numbers. Weed Science continues to be one of the premier journals in the discipline and in the agronomic sciences. The editorial board and the staff strive to improve the efficiency of the publication process and improve the scope of the journal. Weed Science seeks to publish more reviews and symposium articles. This past year, Weed Science published a special issue of Weed Science from presenters at the WSSA Herbicide Resistance Summit II. For the 12 months preceding September 1, 2016, 205 manuscripts were submitted to Weed Science compared with 211 in the previous 12-month period. Of the manuscripts accepted, 45.4% were accepted compared with 44.3% the previous year. The time from submission to first decision was 37 days this past year compared with 44 days for the previous year. The impact factor forWeed Science increased from 1.870 to 1.993 this past reporting cycle, while the 5 year impact factor increased from 1.928 to 2.166. I believe the latest impact factor and the 5 year impact factor are the best the journal has ever had. For the year preceding September 1, 2016, the journal depended on 276 unique reviewers from 28 countries for peer review. The excellent reputation of the journal would not be possible without the cutting-edge research submitted by authors, the diligent work of the editorial board, and the hundreds of referred reviews that are submitted annually. I wish to thank the members of the editorial board and reviewers for 2016.