three honorary societies that elect new members to their ranks each year—the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine—and the National Research Council, the operating arm that conducts the bulk of the institution’s science policy and technical work. The Academies enlist committees of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and other experts, all of whom volunteer their time to study specific issues and concerns. RELATED REPORTS FROM THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine (2001). Reports are available online in a fully searchable format. 23 Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Reproductive Cord Blood: Establishing a National Hematopoietic Stem Cell Bank Program (2005). et and other information about activities related to stem cells at the National Academies are available at www.nationalacademies.org/stemcells. For more information, contact the Board on Life Sciences at bls@nas.edu or visit www.nationalacademies.org/bls. This brochure was prepared by National Research Council staff Anne Jurkowski, Giovanna Guerrero, Fran Sharples, and Adam Fagen in collaboration with Bruce Altevogt and Andrew Pope of the Institute of Medicine’s Health Sciences Policy Board. It was designed by Michele de la Menardiere. Division on Earth and Life Studies Subscribe to the Earth and Life Studies Gateway at http://dels.nas.edu to receive notification of report releases, events, and news about stem cells or other specific areas of interest. Institute of Medicine Sign up to receive IOM News, a free, bi-monthly e-mail newsletter that announces new IOM publications, upcoming events, and new online content. See www.iom.edu/subscribe. To visit the Health Sciences Policy Board, see http://iom.edu/hsp. PHOTO CREDITS Cover images: (top) Nerve cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. PNAS 101(34):12543, Copyright 2004, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. (bottom) Nerve cells derived from human embryonic stem cells in the laboratory of Professor Su-Chun Zhang at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Used with permission from the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents. (inside front and back cover) Neural progenitor cell isolated from human embryonic stem cells. Nat. Biotech. 18:399 (2000). Image Courtesy of Martin Pera. Page 2: (left and right) Nerve cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. PNAS 101(34):12543, Copyright 2004, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. (middle) Nerve cells derived from human embryonic stem cells in the laboratory of Professor Su-Chun Zhang at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Used with permission from the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents. Page 8: (left) NIH/Mr. J. Conaghan. (middle) Kitai Kim, Children’s Hospital. (right) Suslov, Oleg N. et al. PNAS 99:14506. Copyright 2002, The National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 24 Over the past decade, stem cells have gained a place in most Americans’ vocabularies— discussions of them appear on TV and radio news programs, in news Welcome to Cell Regeneration Ye-Guang Chen1* and Ying Lou2* Cell Regeneration, an open-access academic journal, was relaunched by the Chinese Society for Cell Biology in 2019 (Chen and Lou 2019). This journal, founded in 2012, has published many outstanding papers in the past few years. As an official journal of the Society, Cell Regeneration has undergone major actions such as reorganization of the editorial board and reorientation of journals with new scopes. In 2020, the Society and Springer began copublishing Cell Regeneration, aiming to serve the authors and the readers better. To further provide efficient, effective, and equitable peer-review and publishing services, we are continually working on improving the efficiency of the core links in editorial workflow. This year we will try the following measures: 1. On the premise that submission to Cell Regeneration conforms to all editorial policies recognized by COPE, WAME, and ICMJE, the submission process to Cell Regeneration will be simplified. In particular, we will not have a strict requirement on the format of the first submission. If a manuscript can clearly show the scientific rigour, our editors and reviewers will focus on the importance and innovation of the work described in it. By doing so, we hope to reduce the authors’ workload and accelerate the review process. A stringent format requirement will be applied only to the manuscripts ready to be accepted. 2. We try to limit the peer review process to one round. Our handling editors make a judgment on whether a manuscript should be sent out for peer review with evident editorial standards when it is submitted to Cell Regeneration. Reviewers are expected to provide objective and constructive comments to help the authors to improve their overall work. After the revision is returned, the handling editor may recommend a final decision with their careful evaluations and decisive judgments at the end of the first round of revision based on the reviewers’ reports and the authors’ responses, and try to avoid multiple rounds of peer review. In the past year, we have received many excellent articles. For example, in the thematic series “Gene editing and stem cells”, Xingxu Huang and Guang Yang reviewed the advances of genome editing technologies and the derivative technologies using the