20th Anniversary Special Issue

Virology Journal is calling for submissions to our 20th Anniversary Special Issue Collection. 

Virology Journal first published in August 2004. The journal was established in 2004 with Robert Garry (Tulane University) as the founding Editor-in-Chief. It was edited by Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS Medical School) since 2012. With the great leadership from Garry and Wang, Virology Journal now serves as one of the key journals in virology. In its 20th anniversary, there is a change of leadership and it is now co-edited by Alan McLachlan (University of Illinois Chicago) and Leo Poon (The University of Hong Kong).

Unlike traditional virology journals, Virology Journal started with a very different vision in knowledge dissemination. It established a new and dynamic platform for scientific communication. It is an exclusively on-line, open-access, and peer reviewed journal. It considers articles from all disciplines of virology, including research on viruses from  humans, animals, plants, insects, bacteria, fungi and other hosts. Currently, there are 13 different sections to cover different virological areas. It accepts basic research as well as pre-clinical and clinical studies of novel diagnostic tools, vaccines and anti-viral therapies. In addition, it also publishes articles from a wide range of format (Research, Case report, Comment, Methodology, Review and Brief Report). Most importantly, its editorial policy puts less emphasis on interest levels or perceived impact, providing a friendly channel  for virologists to share their latest research findings.

With this highly-inclusive and flexible strategy, Virology Journal published over 4,300 articles from 2004 to 2022 (i.e. about 200 articles per year). These articles were contributed by colleagues from all different geographical locations, with the top 10% contributing countries from all inhabited continents. About 9% of these articles were cited over 50 times and over 80 of which were even cited over 100 times. This indicates that Virology Journal has provided a robust and fair platform for virologists to report their findings and discoveries.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Journal Virology, we invite authors from some highly cited research articles in Virology Journal to contribute short commentaries about their own studies. The reasons of doing this are of several folds. Firstly, this is to recognize their great contributions to the virology community. Findings from these studies have created good impacts to scientific and medical fields. Secondly, this is to acknowledge the support of these authors in using this open-access platform to share their findings. Thirdly, the articles in this series cover a wide range of viruses circulating in different hosts. The original articles mentioned in this collection are surprisingly diverse, including studies related to newly invented virological methods, basic virology, surveillance work, virus evolution and bioinformatic analyses. This reiterates that virology is a broad subject that covers all aspect of live, which requires the use of multidisciplinary approach to address scientific questions. Finally, apart from having short recaps about their own original work, these authors also comment on their work contributed to the development of the field. Furthermore, they also share their opinions about the current major research gaps. Their insights may help to highlight many unanswered virology questions as our future research directions. 

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