Zhuhai, 14 January 2026 – EIVX Publishing Group attended the Xinrui Scientific Journal Awards Ceremony, where the 2025 Annual Awards were announced. The event, organized by Xinrui Scholar — a respected journal ranking platform under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Awards were given in four categories: Individual Awards, Journal & Journal Center Awards, Content & Publishing Innovation Awards, and Sci-Tech Journal Development Ecosystem Awards.

EIVX was honored with the "Annual Journal Center" award, highlighting its exceptional publishing capabilities and innovative practices. This recognition reflects EIVX's commitment to enhancing quality and impact in scholarly communication and advancing global knowledge dissemination.

It has been a busy season for the editorial teams across EIVXPUB, and this update gathers the news that matters most for authors, reviewers and readers. From expanded editorial boards to faster review reporting, here is what has changed at the Public Health and Environment journal and the Life Science and Technology journal — and what is coming next.

A Year of Growth Across the Portfolio

Submissions across the portfolio have grown steadily, with the sharpest rise in interdisciplinary work that connects environmental monitoring to laboratory methods. That growth is welcome, but it also changes how editors work. To keep decision times honest, each journal has added associate editors in regions and specialisms that were previously underserved, so that handling editors can match expertise to manuscripts instead of routing everything through a small core. For authors, the practical effect is simple: manuscripts now reach reviewers who genuinely work in the paper's subfield, and first decisions have become faster even as volume increases.

New Appointments to the Editorial Boards

The Public Health and Environment journal welcomes four new board members whose work spans exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology and health policy, strengthening coverage for studies that previously waited longest for specialist review. On the technology side, the Life Science and Technology journal has added editors with backgrounds in single-cell methods, bioinformatics tooling and instrumentation. Every new appointment was made with a mandate we consider important: reviewers and editors should be researchers who publish actively in the areas they referee, and who are visible enough to be held accountable for the quality of their reports.

Faster Peer Review, Better Reporting

Two process changes are worth announcing in detail. First, the editorial process now includes a published median time to first decision, updated quarterly, so authors can set realistic expectations before submitting rather than guessing. Second, reviewer reports across all journals are now accompanied by a structured editor summary that separates essential revisions from optional suggestions. Early feedback on the summaries has been strongly positive from both sides of the exchange: authors report less guesswork during revisions, and reviewers report fewer disputes about comments that were always meant as taste rather than requirement. Both metrics and the full reporting methodology are visible to readers, because trust in a journal should be verifiable rather than asserted.

Expanding Waivers and Open Access Support

Open access only works if it is genuinely open. This season the waiver programme described in our open access policy was widened, and research groups in lower-income countries now receive automatic consideration for full or partial waivers when they submit to the Agriculture and Biology journal or any other title in the portfolio. Waiver requests are reviewed by staff rather than by handling editors, so asking for support has no bearing on editorial decisions. The policy page also clarifies, in plain language, exactly what article processing charges fund and what they do not.

Thanking Our Reviewers

No editorial update is complete without acknowledging the reviewers whose unpaid, often invisible labour keeps the whole system honest. This season more than two hundred referees completed reports across the portfolio, and several of them reviewed three or more manuscripts in a single quarter. We have always believed that peer review should be a conversation rather than an examination, and the reports we read this year consistently reflected that spirit: specific, constructive and written with the manuscript's future readers in mind. Reviewers who wish to be publicly credited for verified reports can opt in through their reviewer profile, and we encourage every reviewer to claim that credit. To all of them — the specialists who caught the methodological flaws nobody else saw, and the mentors who turned two-line objections into teachable paragraphs — the editorial teams extend their genuine thanks.

What Is Coming Next

Looking ahead, the editorial teams are preparing three things we can already confirm. A special collection on climate-sensitive disease surveillance is being assembled by the Public Health and Environment journal, with a call for contributions expected shortly. The Life Science and Technology journal is planning a methods-reproducibility series focused on reporting standards for computational workflows. And across the portfolio, including the Clinical Medicine Advances journal, structured data statements will become mandatory at submission, a change we will announce on the news pages well before enforcement begins.

How to Stay Informed

Editorial news should reach the people it affects. Milestones, calls for papers and policy changes are published on the EIVXPUB news pages as they happen, and the author guidelines are updated whenever a process change lands, with the effective date shown at the top. If you are considering a submission to the Agriculture and Biology journal or any of our other titles, we recommend checking both before you prepare your manuscript. As always, the editors welcome feedback on these changes: tell us what helps you publish better, and what still gets in the way.

Every submission has a story behind it. In this edition of our author series, we sat down with two researchers who published with EIVXPUB this year: a soil scientist who chose the Agriculture and Biology journal, and a clinician-investigator who published in the Clinical Medicine Advances journal. Their answers, lightly edited for length and clarity, offer a candid look at what open access publishing feels like from the author's side of the desk at EIVXPUB.

Why We Asked Authors to Talk

Editorial announcements and submission statistics only tell part of the story. The decisions that shape a paper — which journal to approach, how to frame the abstract, when to respond to reviewers — are made quietly, by people who rarely get asked about the process afterwards. We wanted to record those decisions while they were still fresh. Both authors agreed on one thing almost immediately: publishing is easier when you understand the journal you are writing for, and harder when you treat every journal as interchangeable.

Choosing the Right Journal Before Submitting

The soil scientist told us her first step was scope, not impact. She browsed recent issues of the Agriculture and Biology journal and read three papers adjacent to her own before drafting anything. 'Once I saw how they handle field trials and molecular data together, I knew my manuscript fitted,' she said. The clinician took a similar approach with the Clinical Medicine Advances journal, checking whether case-series evidence was welcome alongside randomized work. Their shared advice: read the journal, not just its aims and scope page, before you commit months of revision time to the wrong audience.

Preparing the Manuscript for Submission

Both authors recommended working through the author guidelines line by line on the first pass, then skim-reading them again on the final pass. 'The formatting mistakes I made were all things I assumed I knew,' the clinician admitted — referencing style, figure resolution, and the structured abstract requirements. The soil scientist added that writing the cover letter took longer than she expected, and that being specific about the study's contribution mattered more than praising the journal. Neither of them paid an entry fee to submit; details of charges and waivers are covered in the open access policy that both authors said they read only after acceptance, which they now agree was a mistake.

What Peer Review Actually Felt Like

Here their experiences diverged, usefully. The soil scientist received two detailed reviews in under four weeks through the editorial process she described as 'rigorous but readable — the comments argued with my conclusions, not with my competence.' The clinician's review took slightly longer because a statistician was consulted, which he considered a strength rather than a delay. Both reviewers' reports arrived with a summary from the handling editor, and both authors said that summary was the most valuable document in the whole exchange, because it told them which criticisms were essential and which were optional taste.

Revisions, Acceptance and Publication Day

Major revision is where most submissions quietly die, so we asked how they survived it. The answer from both: a point-by-point response letter, written the same week the reviews arrived, while irritation was still productive. The soil scientist's resubmission to the Agriculture and Biology journal was accepted after one further minor pass. The clinician's paper moved through acceptance, copyediting and proofing in a single fortnight, and appeared online within days of the final proof approval — fast enough that colleagues at a conference the following month had already read it, which he described as the real payoff of open access publishing.

Advice These Authors Would Give New Contributors

We closed the interview by asking each author for one piece of advice. The soil scientist: 'Do not dilute your question to make it sound broader. A precise study in the Public Health and Environment journal or any good journal beats a vague one every time.' The clinician pointed colleagues toward the Life Science and Technology journal for collaborators working on methods: 'Interdisciplinary work needs a home that does not punish either side. This one deliberately does not.' Both stressed responding to every reviewer comment explicitly, even the ones you disagree with — a respectful refusal is more persuasive than silence.

Final Thoughts from the Interview

What stayed with us after both conversations was how ordinary the process looked once it was described honestly: a scope check, a careful manuscript, a prompt response letter, and editors who communicated clearly at each stage. If you are preparing your first submission to the Clinical Medicine Advances journal or any of our other titles, the stories above suggest the best predictor of a smooth publication is not brilliance — it is preparation. We will continue this author series throughout the year, and we thank both contributors for their time and their candour.