https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8728-8083
Four! That’s what golfers shout as a warning when their ball is going off target. Or so I used to think when I was small. Actually it’s ‘Fore’, which seems a bit of an old fashioned English word these days. But there’s no mistake in the title of this Editorial – we are celebrating the first impact factor for Advances in Physics: X, and it’s Five! Which is rather good, for starters.
Five is an interesting number. For example, in the Bible where numbers often have a secondary, symbolic meaning, Five is the number of fellowship. In the Exodus the Israelites came out of their captivity in Egypt ‘in fives’ (Exodus 13: 18, original text). Other examples could be given, but that might be stretching even the legendary breadth of APX! And not even the most enthusiastic advocates of the project would regard our journal as spiritual! But this most encouraging marker of the successful establishment of the journal depends in every way on an International Fellowship – amongst Authors, Editors, Advisers, Referees and Staff. My grateful thanks to all who have contributed, five years after the serious work of creating the new journal began. And where next? We can only hope Onwards, Upwards and Fore-ward …