The dog days of late July and early August, linked as they are in the northern hemisphere to the end of the undergraduate teaching year provide opportunity for those of us involved in university teaching to take stock of where we are in terms of courses, their development and their evaluation. Such seasonality is not quite so evident in editorial activities although there are blips in submission rates of manuscripts that reflect critical times in terms of grant completions and so on. Whatever the reasons we have time in these dog days to reflect on our activities. Among my recurrent thoughts as a journal editor at this time are the most recent ‘performance’ figures for Animal Science as demonstrated in the ISI journal citation reports and also perhaps the most exciting development in scientific publishing for many years, the advent of ‘open access’ to scientific papers.