Who would have thought back in January 2020 that a hitherto unknown virus would make its march through Asia, Europe, the US, and almost all countries in the world? In order to prevent the coronavirus from spreading, the world governments have imposed measures of social distancing and forced us to lock down.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), industrial slowdown, together with major disruptions to travel and trade, has caused the largest drop in annual energy demand of the past 70 years and consequently has resulted in a major reduction in global CO₂ emissions, surpassing any previous declines. All fuels except renewables are set to experience their greatest drop in demand for decades.

It's been a tough year but, despite all negative and serious impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on international health and economy, it could at least provide an additional incentive for more sustained and ambitious clean energy solutions to further promote reductions in emissions, with solar power generation playing a key role.

At Solar RRL, we can look back on four successful years related to submissions and publications of major advances in different solar cell technologies, photocatalysis, and solar fuels. In 2020, the journal published 32% more articles than in the year before – a clear sign for the ever‐growing popularity of the journal in the community. A major contribution certainly came from the inclusion of the journal in the Journal Citation Reports and the release of its first Impact Factor of 7.527 in June 2020. Table 1 shows a list of papers from 2018/2019 that will contribute to boost next year's Impact Factor even further.

Despite rising submission numbers, the journal was able to maintain average handling times of 2 weeks from submission to first editorial decision, and 17 days from acceptance to online publication of the final typeset version. The service of publishing author‐supplied manuscript PDFs as Accepted Articles almost instantaneously after acceptance guarantees fast and high visibility of publication results in competitive areas of solar energy conversion research.

The COVID‐19 pandemic limited our physical contact in 2020, but never stopped virtual scientific gatherings. To increase awareness of Solar RRL and advance the perovskite solar photovoltaic area, we organized a virtual symposium on perovskite solar cells, which was streamed live and attracted thousands of visitors via the Chinese video sharing website Biliblili.

One of the highlights of 2020 was certainly the publication of the special issues on “Perovskite Solar Cells and Optoelectronics Part 2” (Issue 2) guest edited by Iván Mora‐Seró (Universitat Jaume I, Spain), Michael Saliba (University of Stuttgart, Germany), and Yuanyuan Zhou (Brown University, USA), and on “Nanomaterials for Light‐Driven Reactions” (Issue 8) with Wee‐Jun Ong (Xiamen University Malaysia, Malaysia) and Kazuhiko Maeda (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) as guest editors. For 2021, we have a number of exciting special issues in the pipeline, such as “Solar Photocatalysis Parts 1 and 2”, guest‐edited by Nianqiang “Nick” Wu (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA), Jiaguo Yu (Wuhan University of Technology, China), and Tierui Zhang (Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China).

Towards the end of last year, we simplified the submission and manuscript transfer process for authors. Solar RRL, the Advanced journal family, and most of their sister journals now have a single, concise set of article types. The most notable change is the discontinuation of the article types “Communication” and “Full Paper”, which are replaced by “Research Article” and can contain original research studies of any length. More information on the article types can be found here, under “Article Types”. We believe this is a significant step towards making life easier for our authors, readers, and reviewers as it greatly reduces the need for formatting in general and reformatting after transfer to a sister journal. While we welcome submissions using our generic Word and LaTeX manuscript templates (valid for all and materials journals), it essentially allows free‐format submissions.

This initiative is part of a global project across Wiley and you will see similar changes to our complete portfolio of journals. It underlines the efforts Wiley is undertaking to make life easier for researchers when preparing, submitting, and reading manuscripts.

We look forward to another successful year of great publications and wish you a happy and healthy 2021!

On behalf of the editorial team,

Anna Troeger

Deputy Editor

Stefan Hildebrandt

Editor‐in Chief

Lulu Ma

Deputy Editor

Carolina Novo Da Silva

Deputy Editor

Samantha Catt

Associate Editor