The year 2020 was undoubtedly a challenging one. Most of us had to adapt to a new reality of social distancing and working from home to prevent the spreading of the new COVID‐19 virus. As we all tried to master this emergency situation to the best of our abilities, one could foresee an adverse impact of laboratory closures and conference cancellations on the scientific output of the research community. While many authors and reviewers had to tackle the challenges of online teaching and disrupted childcare, they endeavored to use this time to write up results and clear their backlog. Although there is still a long way ahead of us back to “normal life”, we are looking to the immediate future with growing optimism and confidence as science intensifies its search for a remedy.

Despite the fact that the majority of live scientific events were either cancelled or replaced by online forums this year, Annalen der Physik had the pleasure of featuring several successful special projects. The quantum physics community has definitely benefited from a collection of works on Dynamic Quantum Matter. The issue was initiated and guest edited by experts in the field: Alexander V. Balatsky, Jason T. Haraldsen, Annica M. Black‐Schaffer, Anna Pertsova, and Philip Hofmann. It summarizes rapid progress in the field of quantum materials with a particular focus on dynamics, including entangled orders, quantum coherence, and quantum topology. If you have not done so yet, we invite you to familiarize yourself with this state‐of‐the‐art research and get inspired by recent achievements.

The November issue of Annalen der Physik is focused on Thermoelectric Materials, which is a prominent example of a stronger applied physics focus in our broad‐scope physics journal. Together with our respected Guest Editors Tiejun Zhu, Li‐Dong Zhao and Chenguang Fu, Annalen der Physik has dived into the depths of recent advances of thermoelectrics to discover that practical applications are closely connected with fundamental electron and phonon transport mechanisms in the solid‐state materials. We are confident that this special issue will stimulate further progress in the field.

More exciting news that we would like to share with our readership comes in the form of new research opportunities in high‐energy physics and related fields, as outlined in the Feature Article ‘Atomic Physics Studies at the Gamma Factory at CERN’. According to the authors this initiative will enable ground‐breaking experiments with partially stripped ion beams and open novel ways of testing fundamental symmetries of nature. We are particularly honored that this impressive outlook article was open‐access published in Annalen der Physik, and we are also looking forward to further cooperation with the lead authors and their colleagues, Dmitry Budker, Mikhail Gorshteyn, Witold Krasny, Adriana Palffy, and Andrey Surzhykov, who have agreed to guest‐edit a topically related special issue ‘Physics Opportunities with the Gamma Factory’ in the upcoming year.

If you or your colleagues have a new idea for a promising special issue or overview article project of any scope or size, you are always very welcome to contact us at ann-phys@wiley.com.

Last but clearly not least, it is with great joy and pride that we announce the Stern–Gerlach Medal award and upcoming DPG presidency term for Prof. Joachim Ullrich, President of the German Metrology institute PTB and previously Guest Editor of “The Revised SI: Fundamental Constants, Basic Physics and Units” special issue published in Annalen der Physik in 2019 . We sincerely value the support provided to our journal and wish Prof. Ullrich much success in his new role as head of the world's biggest physics society.

On the subject of occasions to celebrate, Annalen der Physik has received an increased Impact Factor of 3.317 (Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics, 2020). This achievement is undoubtedly due to the joint effort of all our authors, reviewers, guest editors and readers. Therefore, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all who contribute to the journal's development. We, as editorial team, will do our best to meet your growing quality expectations both in terms of content and publication services.

In this respect, we would like to mention a couple of workflow enhancements which are important steps towards further making your publication experience with us as pleasant and easy as possible. There is also good news for the supporters of open research initiatives as Wiley is expanding its Open Access offerings worldwide and has already eased the preprint policy. The latter is particularly important for many physics authors who tend to post their manuscripts on arXiv.org.

Wiley now has a number of agreements in place with entire countries, institutions, and funders to help authors to publish open access (OnlineOpen). In particular, a landmark agreement was signed with Projekt DEAL, which provides access to most of Wiley's content for the vast majority of German academic and research institutions. Moreover, it allows corresponding authors based at these institutions to publish their articles in our journals with retained copyright under a Creative Commons (CC) license, while publication costs are centrally covered. Find out if your institution is a participant of this or other Open Access programs at Wiley here.

A new licensing workflow was rolled out recently, as part of which all license signing (Copyright Transfer Agreements and CC licenses) is now handled in Author Services. This makes it easier for corresponding authors, especially those who are eligible for OnlineOpen, to choose the most suitable publication conditions for their articles.

Towards the end of last year, we also simplified the submission and manuscript transfer process for authors. The most notable change is the discontinuation of Rapid Research Letters and Original Papers, which have been replaced by a unified Research Article type that can contain original research studies of any length. There is now also a single and likewise flexible Review article format for all overview contributions. More information on the article types can be found here. 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 physics and materials journals), we in essence allow free‐format submissions containing all prerequisite elements.

On this optimistic note we wish you a happy and, first and foremost, a healthy 2021!

2020年无疑是充满挑战的一年。为了防止新型COVID-19病毒的传播，我们大多数人都必须适应社会隔离和在家工作的新现实。当我们都尽力尽力掌握这种紧急情况时，人们可以预见实验室关闭和会议取消对研究界的科学产出的不利影响。尽管许多作者和审稿人不得不应对在线教学和托儿服务中断的挑战，但他们仍在努力利用这段时间来撰写结果并清除积压工作。尽管距离“正常生活”还有很长的路要走，但随着科学越来越多地寻求治疗方法，我们正以越来越乐观和充满信心的眼光展望未来。

尽管今年大多数现场科学活动已被在线论坛取消或取而代之，Annalen der Physik仍然高兴地推荐了几个成功的特殊项目。量子物理学界肯定受益于有关动态量子问题的一系列著作。该问题由以下领域的专家发起并进行了客座编辑：Alexander V. Balatsky，Jason T. Haraldsen，Annica M. Black-Schaffer，Anna Pertsova和Philip Hofmann。它总结了量子材料领域的快速发展，特别关注动力学，包括纠缠顺序，量子相干性和量子拓扑。如果您还没有这样做，我们邀请您熟悉这项最新研究，并从最近的成就中获得启发。

Annalen der Physik的11月号着重于热电材料，这是我们的广义物理学期刊上应用物理重点更加突出的一个突出例子。Annalen der Physik与我们受人尊敬的客座编辑Tiejun Zhu，赵立东和傅晨光一起深入研究了热电学的最新进展，发现实际应用与固态中基本的电子和声子传输机制密切相关材料。我们相信，这一特刊将促进该领域的进一步发展。

我们希望与读者分享的更多令人振奋的新闻是高能物理及相关领域的新研究机会，如专题文章“欧洲核子研究组织伽马工厂的原子物理学研究”所述。这组作者说，该计划将使使用部分剥离离子束的突破性实验成为可能，并开辟新颖的方法来测试自然的基本对称性。令我们印象深刻的是，这篇令人印象深刻的展望文章是在Annalen der Physik上公开发表的，我们对此感到特别荣幸，我们也期待与主要作者及其同事Dmitry Budker，Mikhail Gorshteyn，Witold Krasny，Adriana Palffy和Andrey进一步合作苏尔日科夫（Surzhykov）已同意客串编辑与主题相关的特刊'明年伽玛工厂的物理机会。

如果您或您的同事对任何规模或规模的特殊问题或概述文章项目有新的想法，始终欢迎您与我们联系ann-phys@wiley.com。

最后但并非最不重要的一点是，我们非常高兴和自豪地宣布获得Stern–Gerlach奖章，并宣布即将成为德国计量学会PTB主席，《The Revised SI： 》的特约编辑Joachim Ullrich教授的DPG主席任期。基本常数，基本物理和单位”特刊于2019年在Annalen der Physik上发表。我们衷心珍惜为期刊提供的支持，并祝愿Ullrich教授在担任全球最大物理学会负责人的新角色上取得圆满成功。

在值得庆祝的场合，Annalen der Physik获得了更高的影响因子3.317（《期刊引证报告》，Clarivate Analytics，2020年）。这项成就无疑是由于我们所有作者，审阅者，特邀编辑和读者的共同努力。因此，我们衷心感谢所有为该杂志的发展做出贡献的人。作为编辑团队，我们将竭尽全力满足您在内容和出版服务方面不断增长的质量期望。

在这方面，我们要提及几个工作流程的增强，这是进一步使您在我们这里的出版体验尽可能愉快和轻松的重要步骤。对于开放研究计划的支持者来说，还有一个好消息，因为Wiley正在全球范围内扩展其Open Access产品，并且已经放宽了预印本政策。对于许多倾向于将手稿张贴在arXiv.org上的物理学作者而言，后者尤其重要。

Wiley现在已经与整个国家，机构和资助者达成了许多协议，以帮助作者发布开放获取（OnlineOpen）。特别是，与Projekt DEAL签署了具有里程碑意义的协议，该协议为绝大多数德国学术和研究机构提供了Wiley大部分内容的访问权限。此外，它还允许这些机构中的相应作者根据知识共享（CC）许可在我们的期刊中发表具有保留版权的文章，同时集中承担出版费用。在此处，通过Wiley了解您的机构是否是此计划或其他Open Access计划的参与者。

最近推出了一个新的许可工作流程，其中的所有许可签名（版权转让协议和CC许可）现在都可以在Author Services中进行处理。这使相应的作者，尤其是有资格使用OnlineOpen的作者，更容易为他们的文章选择最合适的出版条件。

去年年底，我们还简化了作者的投稿和稿件传输过程。最显着的变化是快速研究快报和原始论文的停产，已被可包含任何长度的原始研究的统一研究论文类型取代。现在，对于所有概述文稿，还有一个单一且同样灵活的“评论”文章格式。有关文章类型的更多信息，请参见此处。我们认为，这是朝着使我们的作者，读者和审阅者更轻松的生活迈出的重要一步，因为它极大地减少了在转载为姊妹期刊后对常规格式和重新格式化的需求。虽然我们欢迎使用通用的Word和LaTeX原稿模板（对所有物理学和材料期刊均有效）进行投稿，但实际上，我们允许包含所有必备元素的自由格式投稿。

谨此乐观地祝您2021年健康快乐！