This issue of The Euroscientist sees the start of some theming of articles. We will have two main themes running for the next few issues. One is a theme on the very important issue of young scientists in Europe. They are our future, yet in the present they face many challenges and problems over and above their science itself. For the next four issues, young scientists will be writing about some of these challenges and, hopefully, some of the solutions that might be found. In the first article in this series, Marina Encheva, Nadia Koltcheva and Fanny Koleva tell us about the developments in Bulgaria that are improving the working conditions and national training provision for doctoral candidates.

The other new theme is scholarly communication. There are many issues around this topic and we have started by looking at two of the most pressing in the age of the Web – how to identify scientists unambiguously, and how to measure what they are doing. On the first topics we have two articles: Thomas Severiens presents a short account of the more general aspect of identifying people uniquely and how this could be developed in Europe. In the second article, Eberhard Hilf, Bernd Kappenberg and H.E. Roosendaal draw specifically upon the discussion that has been happening within the Euroscience Science Publishing Working Group on author identification, with a plea for the instigation of a European system. On the second topic we have an account by Pauline Mattson of the developments going on in bibliometrics – using the scientific literature to look at patterns of collaboration and the scientific publishing behaviour of scientists.

The final article in this category is an erudite and amusing message from Marie-Claude Roland on how scientists write their articles for publication. Read it, and reflect upon whether you have committed any of the ‘sins’ she writes about. I know I have!

We also hear about the complementarity of Euroscience and local scientific organisations – in this case, the interaction in St.Petersburg between the local association of scientists and Euroscience. Vsevolod Borissov describes how such interactions help Euroscience achieve its aims.

In all, then an interesting and thought-provoking issue with which to end 2008. Let it not provoke only thoughts, but also comments. We have added the facility to comment on each article and we hope this will generate some debate which in turn, may result in new positive developments for European science in 2009 and beyond.

And from Janna (who does all the hard work on this magazine in the Euroscience office) and myself, may we wish a merry Christmas and a happy 2009 to you all.