We have been fortunate enough to take over the editorship of Metascience from the towering figure of Steven French. Steven helped a lot in making Metascience a very respectable journal. We intend to build on his success. Our profession—perhaps more than many others—has been built around books. There certainly have been quite a few very influential papers, but our collective memory, our intellectual heritage and our very subject matter have been, for the most part, shaped by books. Book reviews have always been a vehicle for promoting discussion of fresh ideas, a venue of criticism and an entry point to areas we feel we know less about than we perhaps want or ought to. Book reviews break news, foster argument and quench curiosity.

Metascience is devoted to book reviews and has always aimed to give room to as many books as possible in the area of history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine, broadly construed. Now, that history of science and philosophy of science tend to get back together, after a long period of disciplinary separation, Metascience can be an indispensable forum for their re-integration. Metascience promotes quality and depth; it builds bridges among different traditions; it advances dissemination of information and a better understanding of new ideas and developments.

We intend to encourage review symposia on important and controversial new books and we are particularly keen on having different perspectives on them, coming from philosophy, history and the social studies of science. There will be thematic essay reviews as well as survey reviews that can act as state-of-the art papers on important current topics. There will be reviews of fairly recent books which have played a key role in setting trends and novel lines of argument. We will also aim for a new series of review symposia and essay reviews on old classics—pursuing lines of re-interpretation and seeking for their contemporary relevance.

We very much hope that all these moves will resonate with real needs among philosophers and historians of science and that they will be embraced by the diverse readership of Metascience. What matters, in the end, is the quality of the arguments, the freshness of the ideas, the insightfulness of the perspectives and all this depends on the contributors of Metascience. If past history is any guide to the future, we are confident enough that Metascience will grow stronger in the years to come. We would like to thank the members of the editorial board for their continuous help and support, to express our gratitude to Rachel Ankeny, Ivan Crozier and Richard Yeo for their service to Metascience, to welcome three new members (Michel Ghins, Michael Gordin and Robin Hendry) and to thank Costas Mannouris, the Assistant Editor, for his efficient day-to-day management of the journal.