Dear Colleagues,

As my 5-year tenure as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Membrane Biology reaches the finish line at the end of this year, I would like to share this brief overview of the Journal’s recent developments and achievements.

Track We are proud to report that the hard work of our dedicated team of Associate and Guest Editors has paid off: the trend of declining impact factor (IF) for the journal has reversed, and the IF is now growing. This is particularly valuable, given that many academic publications in the field are continuously struggling to maintain their IF values. We have also put a lot of effort into shortening manuscript review time, resulting in the current median time for the first decision being only seven days. While our journal was not immune to the overall publishing crisis triggered by the pandemic (and by perhaps the even more destructive switch of Springer Publishing to a new editorial manager program), we are poised to report further increases in IF and even shorter times for overall review once the 2023 metrics become available.

Field The Journal of Membrane Biology publishes original experimental and computational studies, reviews, and brief commentaries covering vast areas of membranology. This includes the nature, structure, genesis, and functions of biological membranes, and the physics and chemistry of artificial lipid membranes. In the past four years, JMBi has published six thematic collections/special issues, including those on Membrane and Receptor Dynamics, Na+/K+-ATPase Ion Transport and Receptor-Mediated Signaling Pathways, and Protein-Mediated Membrane Remodeling. Another two collections that became very popular in the biophysical community were the 2022 special issue on Membrane Biophysics in honor of Prof. Erwin London and the 2020–2021 BLANCO-80: Thematic Collection of Structural and Thermodynamic Studies, dedicated to honoring pioneering contributions of Prof. Stephen H. White. In 2020, we introduced a regular “Up-and-Coming Scientists” collection of mini reviews, which provides a venue for early-career researchers, who have not yet achieved tenure, to share their results as well as research plans. These reviews, like the one by Dr. Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith published in this issue, also contain introductions from the Senior Editors of JMBi (in this case by Prof. Damien Thevenin, who had recently joined our team of Editors) positioning the studies of young researchers in a broader context. Readers can explore the past and on-going Thematic Collections of the JMBi via the following link https://link.springer.com/journal/232/collections.

Relay Editing a scientific journal, such as the JMBi, requires a team effort and benefits from periodic rotation of leadership. (On a very personal note, I feel the need for such a rotation so I can devote more time to promoting the Decolonization of Ukrainian Science, e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37334276/). Consequently, it is my honor and pleasure to pass the baton to our next Editor-in-Chief, Professor & Founding Dean of Biological Sciences, CSIR-Center for Cellular & Molecular Biology (Hyderabad, India), Amitabha Chattopadhyay. While Prof. Chattopadhyay (Amit, to his friends and colleagues) needs no introduction, I would like to point out several highlights of his rich career. After receiving his undergraduate degrees in India, he explored the US coasts by earning his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completing postdoctoral training at the University of California at Davis. The subsequent geography of his research and teaching engagements (including India, the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Australia, and Singapore) can be matched only by his numerous areas of expertise and contributions to science, documented in over 300 publications. The topics of his studies range from functioning and lipid interactions of membrane-active peptides to cholesterol-dependent regulation of GPCRs, to the development of fluorescence methods for studying the structure and dynamics of model and biological membranes. Thus, he is uniquely qualified to lead the Editorial team of the Journal of Membrane Biology. Let us wish Amit and this wonderful team great success in the coming years!

Alexey S. Ladokhin,

JMBi Editor-in-Chief (2019–2023),

Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,

The University of Kansas Medical Center.