Just 2 years from its official launch in February 2018, Communications Physics has already hit a thousand submissions and published almost 300 papers, covering a wide variety of topics from condensed-matter physics, to photonics, to biological physics. Our articles have been widely shared on social media, and occasionally have been covered by news outlets, including the New York Times and the Independent1. Many of our authors have accepted our invitation to tell us more about their work by writing a ‘behind the paper’ piece on the Device and Materials Engineering and Astronomy Community websites. In the upcoming years, we wish to engage even more in public outreach, and to increase our efforts in communicating exciting scientific advances to a wider public.

With our authors' and reviewers’ confidence, and the support of our editorial board, we envision establishing Communications Physics as an outlet associated with high-quality standards, trust and fairness.

Communications Physics was launched with the purpose of serving the physics community by reporting high-quality significant advances across all subfields, as well as from related, relevant disciplines. From the beginning, we wanted to directly involve academics in the peer-review process, and only in the last year, our editorial board has grown from 6 to 12 members. Our editorial team has also doubled, with new editors extending our in-house expertise to the areas of optics, photonics, complex systems and soft and active matter.

In a continuously widening and evolving publishing landscape, we know that authors have multiple choices on where to publish, and we are grateful to all those across the globe who have given us their trust. We hope that this trust will continue to grow over the years, and our efforts are devoted to keep deserving it by improving and innovating our community service. In 2020, we want to focus on shortening our turn-around times in making decisions on submitted papers. By the second half of 2019, authors were informed within an average of 7 days as to whether their paper was going to be considered for peer review in the journal or not, and received a first decision post review within 50–55 days. As publications play an increasingly critical role in obtaining grants and positions, we aim to guarantee the shortest possible decision times by keeping high-quality reviewing standards.

In this respect, the generous contribution of our referees plays a fundamental role. By accepting to review a paper and providing a timely and exhaustive report, academic referees not only advise editors in making decisions, but also help the journal in maintaining high-quality standards while improving author service. In 2019, 700 reviewers supported the journal by offering their precious advice, summing up to a total of 1300 since the journal opened for submission. We strive to increase the diversity of the reviewers we invite, be it in terms of gender, geography or career stage2, and we intend to become more and more inclusive in the years to come. With increasing demand on peer reviewers, we are even more indebted to all the researchers who have worked with us in the past 2 years; no journal would be able to operate without them. Some of these individuals put in remarkable effort to make their review timely, thorough and constructive, and we felt that it was time to acknowledge them individually. This is why, in this second year, each month we have been acknowledging an outstanding reviewer on our webpage; the feedback we received for doing so has been overwhelmingly encouraging.

To celebrate Communications Physics second birthday, our editors have chosen their favourite article published each month in 2019. This compilation is intended to represent the breath of topics and quality of the work we publish. This Editors’ picks collection will be updated every month in 2020 as it is our birthday wish that our readers will have an excuse to glance regularly at the editors’ choice.

With our authors and reviewers’ confidence and the support of our editorial board, we envision establishing Communications Physics as an outlet associated with high-quality standards, trust and fairness, while keeping an open mind to evolve alongside the community we wish to serve. We would be interested in hearing what improvements and innovations you, the physics community, would like to see in the upcoming years, and we encourage you to send direct feedback, or to use the comments function available for every article we publish. We look forward to receiving and publishing exciting research, insightful commentaries, informative reviews and other content of interest to our readers.