Collective success at IOP Publishing starts and ends with our people. The company’s terrific all-round performance in 2018, highlighted in this report, reflects the value that our teams place on their relationships with our customers – authors, referees, editorial boards, librarians and partner organisations.

Research authors, for their part, rightly demand the highest level of service from their publishers as they seek greater visibility, recognition and impact for their scientific endeavours. Meanwhile, some research funders, especially those endorsing Plan S, look to impose the most stringent conditions on our publishing and to forcibly migrate us from a predominantly subscription-based model to a wholly open access model, under which they envisage a stark reduction in what we might charge for our services. Scientific publishing is a global enterprise, as is scientific research itself, and positions and policies on these matters vary considerably between countries, even within countries. As a specialist publisher, we must manage these multiple expectations with ever-greater efficiency, while providing the same high quality of service to all our authors, readers, librarians and partners.

This annual report sets out how we are responding to these challenges: increasing the visibility of the research that we publish, through both technical means and a substantial expansion of our open access publishing; increasing impact and recognition for our authors, by providing an exemplary service to them, not least in the speed and quality of peer review and publication; and supporting the scientific mission of our partners by providing operational excellence and guidance across all stages of the publishing cycle.