Stem Cell Research & Therapy marks its first anniversary

Stem Cell Research & Therapy is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal with a special emphasis on basic, translational, and clinical research into stem cell therapeutics, including animal models, and clinical trials. At launch we noted both the enormous potential of stem cell therapies and the major hurdles that have to be overcome [1]. While the past year has seen continued legal turmoil regarding government funding of embryonic stem cell research in the USA [2], stem cell research continues to progress apace internationally.In a fast-moving world the importance of research results being disseminated as quickly and widely as possible cannot be underestimated. All research articles published in Stem Cell Research & Therapy are open access; they are freely available online from the moment of publication and universally accessible regardless of location, affiliation or ability to pay. Articles are archived in a number of open access repositories to ensure their permanent availability, including PubMed Central [3]. Wider distribution of their work is possible as authors retain the copyright of their article while allowing others to use and reproduce it with correct attribution. Open access publishing means research is much more visible both within the academic community and the wider population, and some studies have suggested that this increased availability may lead to an open access article being more likely to be cited [4].Online publication allows us to measure the number of times an article has been accessed via the journal website. As research articles are open access and available via other sources, such as PubMed Central, overall accesses will be considerably higher, however these figures are highly encouraging and indicate that our articles are being well-accessed. At the time of writing our most-accessed research article is from Mohan Vemuri and colleagues, describing a novel serum-free mesenchymal stem cell culture medium which could substitut