October 2016 From the Editor

Every September, we editors step onto a virtual slide that takes us into the new year with increasing steepness and velocity. Here come the fall supplements and special projects! And as the new year approaches, our momentum is often halted abruptly by the November and December holiday schedules, during which many of our contacts seem to vanish.

The highlight of our fall season is always the BioProcess International Conference and Exposition in Boston, this year occurring the very week that you should be receiving this issue and supplement. We work closely with our Informa conference colleagues to ensure that conference presentations and print offerings together enhance your work experience, providing multiple viewpoints on key themes. We collaborate for on-site interviews and webcasts, preconference white papers, and other highlights. And we seek to develop manuscripts with those presenters whose especially timely talks generate the greatest “buzz” during our week in Massachusetts.

We hope to see you there at our annual celebration of the industry’s accomplishments — which helps us determine what key topics to explore editorially in the coming year. Many thanks to the organizers for another excellent program of timely insights. And our biannual BPI Awards banquet is looking great! Finalists will be announced shortly after I write this, and I am eager to share the final results with you.

As we head into this busy planning season, I want to tell you about one important project that has been completed: the latest revision of our online Author Guidelines. Whereas past versions have been restricted by printed page sizes, the online version can link to a number of supporting documents (you can teach an old editor new tricks). You can find details about submitting graphics for your manuscripts, see the form our reviewers receive with your blinded manuscript, examine our copyright forms, and consider relevant themes and submission dates for 2017. I have also included some of our key copy-editing and house-style criteria — an increasingly rare service we provide in this age of open-source publishing. If you’re looking for more information, please let me know. A critical issue for the editors is that our submission deadlines are a full three months earlier than those published for sending in advertising-related files. I hope that the description of our editorial process will help explain why that is necessary.

As we head into BPI’s 15th-anniversary year this January, you’ll see some changes in how we arrange themes and special reports. All our key topics remain, and the year begins in earnest with focused sections on single-use technologies (January), cell and gene therapies (February), and outsourcing (March). We are looking for viewpoints, white papers, analyses, and manuscripts detailing how to address current industry needs. Perhaps you would like to contact one of us to plan a writing project before the holidays descend upon us. Opportunities abound, and we will be offering a number of new publication options in 2017. We hope to talk to many of you in Boston and — as always — look forward to working with you in the new year.