Welcome to Volume 9 of Optics Express. I want to call everyone’s attention to a breakthrough that occurred in Volume 8. After nagging authors for a year or more, my efforts finally paid off (you can see I want to take credit for this!) in the publication of an article in which an audio voiceover was used to provide captioning of movies. This was handled extremely well by the authors, and enhanced greatly the effect of the video presentation. I congratulate them for taking up the “audio challenge” laid down in the very first issue of Optics Express by the article of West and Stroud. The recent audio-enhanced article was “Phase-space analysis of double ionization” by Manfred Lein, Volker Engel and E. Gross. It appeared on page 411 (Vol. 8) as part of an excellent Focus Issue on Laser-Induced Multiple Ionization coordinated by Wilhelm Becker and Mikhail Fedorov.

Since Optics Express completed its fourth year of publication last month, we can ask - how well are we doing? Five years is usually said to be the break-in time for scientific journals, the time needed by every successful new journal to become accepted by the community it intends to serve. No one knows if this time is longer or shorter for a new type of journal, and Optics Express undoubtedly qualifies as an entirely new type, certainly in the physical sciences. Still, it would be nice to identify some benchmarks by which we could judge progress.

Maybe the most direct comparison, and easiest to think about for members of the optics community, would be with Optics Letters, the most recent previous start-up by OSA. It’s nice to report that start-up similarities with Optics Express are reassuring. In the first four years of publication, although Optics Letters grew more steadily, both journals experienced wide swings, occasionally up to 50%, in the number of papers published in succeeding six-month intervals. In their fourth six month period both published slightly fewer articles than in their first, but after four full years both were publishing at a rate more than 50% higher than at start-up. If these parallels continue, given the wide and enviable reputation of Optics Letters in its third decade of publication, Optics Express has a bright future indeed.

Technical improvements continue to be made, most recently in the user-friendly search engine, and the time to publication for articles submitted to Optics Express is still only 7–8 weeks (not months). This is clearly the most efficient way to get your important results reviewed and published, so send the papers in!

J.H. Eberly, Editor