Natural Product Communications (NPC) provides a major venue for rapid publication of high quality natural products research, including organic, medicinal, pharmaceutical, bioorganic, analytical, theoretical, biotechnological and chemotaxonomic aspects. NPC has continued to make progress and has attracted the attention of scientists worldwide, as indicated by the increasing number of both submissions and published papers, and also from the web statistics. It is worthy of mention that despite the fact that NPC only started in 2006, it has become a SCI cited journal with an impact factor in 2008 of 0.766. It is included in the following Indexing and Abstracting services.

MEDLINE
Chemical Abstracts Services/SciFinder (ACS )
Current Contents®/ Agriculture, Biology, and Environmental Sciences
Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition
Natural Products Update (Royal Society of Chemistry)
Science Citation Index Expanded
This has only been possible due to the large number of high quality submissions and the tremendous efforts of the reviewers. We are very grateful to all the authors and the reviewers for dealing with the manuscripts so quickly.

During 2009 we had two thematic issues on ‘Healthy Beverages with Natural Products in Relation to Mediterranean Diet’, and ‘Chemical Biodiversity of Secondary Metabolites from Endophytic Fungi’, and honorarium issues to commemorate the birthdays of two internationally renowned natural product researchers, Professors Kurt Hostettmann and Francesco De Simone. We thank all those authors who contributed papers to these issues and the reviewers, all of whom responded to a short and challenging timetable. We are pleased to mention that NPC will be proud to recognize other eminent scientists by dedicating an issue in their honour, and suggestions would be welcomed.

We are committed to placing this journal at the forefront for the dissemination of novel and exciting natural products research. We should like to remind all prospective authors that NPC does not have a page restriction, although we strongly encourage them to present their results in an even number of pages. Technical details of lesser priority should preferably be included in ‘supporting information’ rather than in the main text. We look forward to receiving your submissions and to receiving feedback.

For the information of our authors and readers, we have to announce some changes to the Editorial Board of Advisors for 2009. Professors Samuel Danishefsky, Stephen Hanessian, Anita Marsaioli, Virinder Parmar, Hiromitsu Takayama, and Paul Wender are leaving the Editorial Board of Advisors. We thank all of them for their support. We are, however, pleased to report that as of January 2010, Professors Julie Banerji, Cristina Garcia-Viguera, Karsten Krohn, M. Soledade C. Pedras, Phila Raharivelomanana, and Winston F. Tinto will be joining the Editorial Advisory Board. We welcome them all and look forward to working with them.

Dr Pawan K. Agrawal
Professor Gerald Blunden (Honorary)
Professor Alessandra Braca
Professor Dean Guo
Professor J. Alberto Marco
Professor Yoshihiro Mimaki
Professor Stephen G. Pyne
Professor Manfred G. Reinecke
Professor William N. Setzer
Associate Professor Yasuhiro Tezuka
Professor David E. Thurston