As many of you will have seen, the 2016 World’s Poultry Congress in Beijing is gearing up – with abstracts in and preparations underway. Our association news contains more information on this – the organisers have been sorting out cheaper ways for attendance and there are prizes up for grabs for students, so do check out their website. The Board will be having their annual meeting there as well – which is a good time to catch up with all the reviewers and editorial board members who we rely on heavily for support of the journal – many thanks to all of them.

I do hope many of you have been receiving papers via FirstView – which publishes papers online as soon as they are finalised in the editorial office. We have more papers than ever to process, so if you have delay in your review coming out please bear in mind we operate typically six months ahead in terms of final publishing from final approval. I have recently returned from publishers meetings in the UK and attended the WPSA UK conference in Chester as well – where we held a memorial for Prof. Gordon Rosen, who sadly died last year. The conference dinner was followed by a very well attended drinks party held in the bar (as Gordon would have approved of) with his widow Mrs. Vanda Rosen present for the WPSA dinner as well as the celebration of his life. I have never been at such a memorial gathering before and many people came and said lovely things about Gordon. Several speeches were made regarding his wonderful character, sense of humour and attitude to precision in poultry science. Mention was made of his tendency to be the ‘sweet old man’ in the front row of conferences who delivered killer questions to the unwary! I know Vanda would like to thank the organisers, especially Dr Mike Bedford, Dr Emily Burton and Dr Vicky Sandilands and the UK board for their assistance in organising such a great event.

We have had another sad loss of an excellent poultry scientist; Ir Douwe Arnold Ehlhardt in the Netherlands recently passed away (see obituary). His contribution highlights how much was done by scientists in the past to not only to progress poultry production, but also to change how poultry are raised to come into line with modern needs.

However, as always, science moves on and we have an excellent program of WPSA related symposia during the year. Please do support these events and their sponsors, as without the latter we could not keep up the essential discussion between business and academia.

See you all in China!

Dr Lucy Waldron

Editor