Early 2012 we announced SpringerPlus, Springer’s first peer-reviewed Open Access journal open for research from all disciplines in the Humanities, Science, Technology and  Medicine. For SpringerPlus a manuscript is never out of scope: when the science is sound we will consider it for publication!

SpringerPlus is fully and immediately open access and will publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. This makes it easy for authors to fully comply with open access mandates and retain copyright. SpringerPlus offers open access and our expertise in delivering high-quality and rapid publications, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process.

Over the past year we saw the number of submissions increase from around 50 in July to a total of 422 at the end of the year, clearly indicating that SpringerPlus found its place as an attractive place to publish scientific research. And SpringerPlus is all about high quality science, we follow the same high standards for publication as all other Springer journals and this shows from the statistics: in 2012 we accepted 101 manuscripts for publication and rejected 83, giving an acceptance rate of 55%.

All our articles are peer-reviewed and this requires an exceptional editorial board with leading academics from all disciplines, and we are grateful for the efforts these academics and all our peer-reviewers put in providing our authors with valuable feedback.

All the SpringerPlus sections received manuscripts in 2012, and by this time (February 2013) all sections have published articles. We received the majority of submissions in the biological and medical sciences, the next four sections computer science, chemistry and materials science, mathematics and earth and environmental sciences nearly tie at around 30 submissions each:

In 2012 we also launched our first themed article collection, the SpringerPlus Breast Cancer article collection edited by Professor Lippman. Already seven outstanding articles were published in this collection in 2012, and we hope to publish many more. We hope to launch more article collections and special issues later this year, and we’re always interested to learn about new topics!

We look forward to our second year of scientific interactions and great publications. Join SpringerPlus now and submit your next manuscript here: http://www.springerplus.com/manuscript

The SpringerPlus editorial team
Max Haring, PhD, Executive editor