2018 was my first year at IOP Publishing and what an amazing year it’s been! Our first ever annual publishing report is intended to showcase all the great work that we’re doing in serving our authors, referees, editorial boards and partners. IOP Publishing has long placed emphasis on ensuring the best possible experience for our customers and that emphasis, combined with our global reach and focus on operational excellence, means that we can provide impact, recognition and value for our physical science communities. We’re small enough to care, and big enough to deliver, and together with our learned society status, this is what sets us apart from our large commercial rivals. We’re operating in a highly competitive marketplace and success hinges on us attracting and retaining more authors.

In an author-pays model of gold open access, the experience that an author has with us becomes even more important. Open access publishing is now a norm and Plan S looks set to further accelerate the wider uptake of open access. Whatever the future holds, if we can succeed in attracting and retaining more authors then we can continue to improve both the quality and quantity of our articles, journals, books and conference series, attract more society partners who similarly want to grow their author communities, and have more high-quality products to sell to librarians. Keeping authors happy means that we have to offer best-in-class peer review and publishing services, which in turn means recognising and rewarding our referees (who are themselves authors). Winning and retaining authors is a goal that everyone in the company is aligned behind as we look to continuously improve our publishing services and business practices.