Brain and Neuroscience Advances – 2024 in review

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Journals, and science more broadly, are akin to a relay race. These are team enterprises, requiring talented and motivated individuals, dedicating their time to training over the long term, and then giving their maximal focus and effort to pursue the collective goal of a short, brilliant and memorable run together. Baton handovers are key! Although each race goes around the track, ending-up approximately back where you started, no race is ever the same, and incrementally the teams get stronger/smoother/faster so the entire field improves.

I’m no athlete, but 2024 has been a year of passing-on-the-baton at Brain and Neuroscience Advances. After a decade of developing our journal’s concept, spear-heading our launch and steering our development, Jeff Dalley handed on the Editor-in-Chief’s stick (and carrot) to me. We ran alongside each other for a year or so, and I’ve tried not to drop the journal’s ethos or processes now that I’m going it alone. In 2025, I will be joined on the track by a new EiC (watch this space), so that this relay team has fresh legs going forwards.

Our publication has burgeoned in 2024, and I’d like to highlight articles with a (loose) relay race theme:

Summarising and reflecting, our journal’s strength this year has been the diversity of our articles (Figure 1). Few people would attend an athletics fixture if it only featured discus or 800 m (brilliant as those disciplines may be). It’s the variety of events, and the connections and contrasts between them, which probably makes the whole thing (neuroscience) fun!

My thanks to the many individuals who provided timely, high-quality peer reviews for submitted articles in 2024; to the BNA Chief Executive Laura Ajram and the BNA Council for their strategic support to the journal; and to our publishing team at Sage.

So what’s on the fixtures calendar for 2025? Based on my EiC inbox, I am confident that we will be publishing strong articles that consolidate and extend this diversity. BNAdvances is the society journal of the BNA, so excitement is mounting about the BNA2025 International Festival of Neuroscience (https://meetings.bna.org.uk/bna2025/), where we will produce the second edition of Desert Island Papers and promote neuroscience writing as broadly as possible. I hope to see you there, and look forward to reading and publishing your BNAdvances submissions in 2025!