A great deal can happen over the course of a year, and December offers an opportunity to pause and take it all in. In this post, we highlight the key milestones and initiatives that have marked FEBS Open Bio’s activities in 2025. A more detailed report of the journal’s progress will be available in our January editorial, to be published in the new year.

Highlights of 2025

Empowering Early-Career Researchers 👩🏾‍🔬

Supporting Early-Career Researchers (ECRs) remains a core priority for FEBS Open Bio. This year, we:

• Awarded 39 poster and oral communication prizes at various scientific meetings, including at the 49^th FEBS Congress.

• Presented the FEBS Open Bio Article Prize to Giulia Lunghi for her outstanding paper on “GM1 ganglioside exerts protective effects against glutamate-excitotoxicity via its oligosaccharide in wild-type and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis motor neurons”

• Networked with PhD students and postdocs at several FEBS Advanced Courses and introduced them to the benefits of publishing in FEBS Open Bio.

• Published all poster and talk abstracts from the 49th FEBS Congress and the 3^rd FEBS-IUBMB-ENABLE conference, providing ECRs a platform to showcase their work.

Supporting Preprint-Based Peer Review 🔁

FEBS Open Bio actively supports the use of preprints and aims to reduce barriers for authors throughout the publishing process. Recently, we:

• Joined the Review Commons Rapid Commitment (RC-RC) programme, allowing authors who have been declined by two affiliate journals, to have their manuscript assessed by either FEBS Open Bio or Life Science Alliance within 48 hours, reducing the need for repeated rounds of peer review.

Spotlighting Hot Topics 🔍

Our ‘In the Limelight’ special issues – a curated collection of articles on topics of crucial interest – brought attention to five different timely areas of research:

• Education – highlighting the techniques, resources, and innovative methods used in education in the biochemistry and molecular sciences fields.

• Structural Bioinformatics – exploring how different computational and AI-driven approaches to protein structure have advanced the field of structural bioinformatics.

• Research Protocols – featuring a broad and highly applicable set of experimental procedures that can be used by researchers to help tackle the ongoing reproducibility crisis.

• Non-coding RNAs in Cancer – highlighting the crucial involvement of non-coding RNAs in cancer progression and regulation.

• Tumor-Stroma Interactions – focusing on the evolving interplay between tumour cells and their surrounding stroma.

Expanding our boards 🌐

FEBS Open Bio continues to grow its editorial community to maintain a fast, fair, and thorough peer review process. In 2025, we:

• Established our Editorial Steering Committee – a small group of Editors who provide regular input to help the journal stay agile in the rapidly evolving publishing field.
• Launched the Publishing Liaison Officer (PLO) role, aimed at bridging the gap between FEBS Open Bio and the scientific community, with 6 PLOs appointed. 
• Welcomed 4 new members to our Editorial Advisory Board.
• Added 14 new members to our Volunteer Reviewer Pool.

These highlights capture some of the many ways FEBS Open Bio engaged with the scientific community throughout 2025; none of them achievable without the contributions of our authors, readers, reviewers, and editors. We sincerely thank you all for your continued support of the journal and wish you a happy New Year!

For updates on FEBS Open Bio’s activities and plans for 2026, stay tuned for our dedicated post in the new year.

Top image by alex_ugalek from Getty Images Pro (sourced from Canva)