Starting out the year 2021 by looking back at the year 2020 might seem like an exercise in masochism, given the horrific loss of life, the untold economic hardships, the resurgence of white supremacy across the country, and the rampant (and at times utterly incomprehensible) political chaos packed into those 12 months. There were, however, many redeeming aspects of the year, not least of which was a panoply of breathtaking scientific achievements. The development of not just one but several remarkably effective vaccines against COVID-19, a hitherto completely unknown virus, in less than 12 months was unprecedented (and was among the reasons Oxford Languages chose “unprecedented” as one of its choices for “word of the year,” https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/). But even beyond assembling, with astonishing rapidity, the body of knowledge required for successful vaccine development, the scientific community across a broad span of disciplines continued to discover and innovate with inspiring resilience. Like so many other journals, PNAS experienced a surge in manuscript submissions—an increase of about 20% for the year, in fact, resulting in the publication of more than 3,600 research articles this year, compared with ∼3,250 last year.
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