In 2012, Jan Kuras, publishing editor for Chemistry Central, visited me in Bristol. At the time he had helped establish Chemistry Central Journal which was the first broadly based OA (Open Access) journal in chemistry, now rebranded as BMC Chemistry, and I was one of the section editors. We had published two successful article collections based around heritage science. Jan was looking to develop new ideas for child journals. He had already helped establish Journal of Cheminformatics in 2009, which continues to be a very successful leading journal.

After a series of discussions, which included Bailey Fallon, who joined the team, we decided to put together a proposal for a new journal, Heritage Science, which launched in April 2013. The idea of OA publication in this area was somewhat unfamiliar at the time. Many people published in monographs, or in informal conference proceedings (the grey literature), or in-house magazines, especially in museums and galleries which were a significant part of our original target readership. Most academics were familiar with subscription journals, but many do not have a large reach, for example in museums, galleries, small conservation institutes, for reason of cost. At the time there were a small number of OA on-line journals in the area but none supported by a major international publisher. The journal first went on-line in 2013 and has now existed for eleven years^1,2,3.

The area is conservative and at the time this format was unfamiliar to many in the field. Growth of submissions was slow, mainly via article collections (aka special issues) for the first few years. Many workers in this field had less familiarity with formal refereed on-line journals. Most scientific journals are now on-line only and all OA journals all as such: but to many especially in cultural institutes the distinction between refereed articles in journals listed in databases such as Clarivate or Scopus and informal on-line webpages was rather vague at the time. For academics many at the time were familiar primarily with traditional subscription journals. So we had to pioneer our pathway taking a lot of persuasion. Refereeing is the main distinction between the formal scientific literature and a webpage anyone can set up and a key to the publisher Springer Nature is that they are very experienced with standards of assessment via refereeing.

However, recognition by formal indexing databases was quite swift. In 2013 we were listed by Scopus (Elsevier). In 2015 we were among the first journals listed in Web of Science ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate)) and in 2018 were advanced to their SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded) and AHCI (Arts and Humanities Citation Index), with our first IF (Impact Factor).

This led to a substantial increase in submissions. The years 2020 and 2021 restricted growth because of covid, when publication patterns changed somewhat. By 2022 growth started in accelerate again. In 2024 AHCI announced their first IF rankings. Although the same IF as SCIE, as a journal listed among Humanities, we reached D1 (the top 10%) and the 3^rd ranking out of 411. This gave the journal a substantial boost and our submissions have increased strongly over the last year.

To illustrate this significant increase in submissions, there were 44 in January 2023, 71 in January 2024, and 186 in December 2024. or more than four times the number in December 2024 compared to January 2023. The number of articles published per year has also increased substantially from 36 in 2013 to 431 in 2024.

The increase of articles published and submitted is illustrated in Fig. 1. Data for submissions prior to 2015 is unavailable due to change in editorial software prior to that date. The number submitted increased faster than the number published on-line due to increased rejection rates. Figure 2 illustrates the ratio of published articles to submitted articles each year since 2016 (data in 2015 is incomplete). This approximates to acceptance rate, which was around 80% in 2016 and 30% in 2024, corresponding to higher standards. In the first years, most articles were invited or part of article collections (aka special issues), whereas at present the majority are unsolicited. In 2024 we published just 20 articles from article collections meaning only 20/431 or 4.6% of articles came from article collections. Nevertheless, we hope for several new, high quality, collections next year, and they do enrich the journal and are working on several excellent proposals for the new year. However, the high level of unsolicited submissions demonstrates the attractiveness of our journal which we hope will continue.

Articles published and number of submissions over time.

Full size image

Ratio of number of publications to submissions since 2016.

Full size image

Together with this, citations, as one indicator of the profile of our journal, have increased. We anticipate a substantially increased IF in 2025, which is an indicator of the quality of articles published in 2022 and 2023. At time of writing, five articles published in these years are listed as “highly cited” in Web of Science (Clarivate), with an article published in 2023⁴ cited a remarkable 47 times in the single year of 2024.

In addition to this, the diversity of submissions has substantially increased. The original journal was founded very much on the study of traditional European heritage objects such as fine arts, but over the last few years, we have been receiving articles on a much wider variety of topics and from a much wider number of regions. The cultural heritage in for example China or India or Egypt is quite different to that from Europe and as such often requires very different solutions and poses different problems. We are fortunate to have had a strong expansion in Asian countries especially China where there has been huge progress in conservation and heritage over the last few years. New topics are especially in applications of computer science such as digital heritage, in geographical heritage, and in social sciences. This has meant a significant update to the scope. All science must change with the times, and the topics that were in the forefront ten years ago, may become well established, but new opportunities emerge, so it is important a leading international journal moves with the times. In the new incarnation of the journal we have carefully updated the scope into fourteen main themes, as in Table 1. In parallel with this we are working on increasing the diversity of the Editorial Board and Associate Editors, to reflect the breadth of topics and geographical spread of our authors.

We have invited a fantastic team of Associate Editors, many of whom already have substantial editorial experience to help lead the topics, and will be expanding this further. Our Editorial Board contains many colleagues who have contributed as regular referees, authors and guest editors, to enrich the coverage and diversity of the journal.

With the transfer to Nature Portfolio Journals we are confident that npj Heritage Science has a bright future, and will develop into a leading broadly based international journal in this rapidly expanding field, and look forward to the next year with excitement.