Dear readers, authors and referees of physica status solidi, With the present issue and the start of the New Year following our 50th anniversary the editorial structure of pss undergoes some important formal changes. As already announced in the previous Editorial 1] twelve months ago, our former Editor‐in‐Chief Martin Stutzmann, Technische Universität München, has retired from the Editorial Board. This happens after 16 very successful years during which the journal has been brought back to prosperity. It is with deep gratitude to Martin for his strong vision, engagement, support and cooperation over one and a half decade that we meet this moment of changing duties. The fundamental transformation that the progress of electronic publishing brought to the business and the growth of pss to its current amount of output over the last years have resulted in an immense increase of workload for the editors, requiring practically full‐time dedication. Therefore, the role of an academic Editor‐in‐Chief will not be continued, transferring the central responsibility for pss to the hands of the Editors at the Wiley‐VCH office in Berlin and colleagues worldwide. We believe that this is a necessary modification to adapt to the changing publishing environment and habits, putting pss in a position to dynamically respond to ongoing developments. In fact, we currently observe the same policy change for other large journals in our publishing house, e.g. in polymer physics or quantum chemistry, not to mention successful Wiley‐VCH titles such as Advanced Materials or Angewandte Chemie which have been led by ‘in‐house’ Editorials for many years. Despite or even because of these present changes, close contacts of our editorial team to the scientific community will be ever more important for pss. This is why we strive to maintain and further develop a strong and active Board of the journal. Moreover, regardless of the differences in scope between pss (a) and (b), the trend of overlapping basic and applied research aspects in solid state physics has further manifested. Besides, our two other journals pss (RRL) and pss (c) cover the full spectrum of the field by definition. Therefore we have decided to create, from 2012, one joint Editorial Advisory Board for the entire pss family which will embrace many members of the previous separate Boards of the four journals (see ‘Issue Information’ online and inside front cover in the print edition, respectively). We are particularly pleased to welcome, at this moment, five new members to the Advisory Board: David A. Drabold , Ohio University, OH, USA; Sebastian T. B. Gönnenwein , Walther‐Meissner‐Institut and Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany; Nicholas Grandjean , École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; J. Marty Gregg , Queen’s University Belfast, UK; Ferdinand Scholz , Universität Ulm, Germany; and G. Jeffrey Snyder , California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. We will present them with photographs and short biographies in one of the forthcoming issues, and you should also look out for additional new Board members to join in the near future.
