key: cord-0849687-hq04br2s authors: Lake, Francesca title: Welcome to volume 7 of Future Science OA date: 2020-11-09 journal: Future science OA DOI: 10.2144/fsoa-2020-0180 sha: 6d291686d65bf38885a0ea4846d8722f415016fa doc_id: 849687 cord_uid: hq04br2s nan -down from 80% in 2019, although I note that COVID-19 submissions have been partially responsible for this dip. As mentioned above, we have received over 1000 citations this year, up from the 787 we had received at the time of writing last year's Foreword. This is an appreciable year-on-year increase. Topic areas covered in the journal continue to reflect the state of the biomedical field ( Figure 1 ). Our author demographics remain consistent (Figure 2 ), and our readership remains global and, again, fairly consistent ( Figure 3 ). These latter two demographics reflect our ability to provide authors from low-income countries with fee waivers, and the fact that we are open access and represented across most scholarly research search engines, ensuring access to as many readers as we can. We also continue to publish lay abstracts, which -we hope -goes some way to ensuring the public can understand the research their taxes may have helped produce. As always, we are hugely thankful to our contributors. In particular this year, a special mention goes to the over 350 researchers who have peer reviewed for us in 2020, despite being locked out of labs or working overtime due to COVID-19. Figure 3 . Location of readers of Future Science OA. My main hope for 2021 is that the COVID-19 pandemic is consigned to history -not necessarily a given, at this point. In better news, next year we look forward to more special focus issues, the next iteration of the Future Science Future Star Award, and working with more exciting researchers to perfect their publications. We are also currently working to make ourselves compliant with the requirements of Plan S. If you have any suggestions for topic coverage, special issues or collaborations in 2021, please get in touch. Financial & competing interests disclosure F Lake is an employee of Future Science Ltd. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed. No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript. Cannabis for COVID-19: can cannabinoids quell the cytokine storm? Toll-like receptors and COVID-19: a two-faced story with an exciting ending Estimation of US patients with cancer who may respond to cytotoxic chemotherapy Elective egg freezing: what is the vision of women around the globe? Towards a unified Latin American Natural Products Database: LANaPD A new standardized data collection system for brain stereotactic external radiotherapy: the PRE.M