Chinese Optics Letters (COL) will enter its 20th year in 2023. Looking back at the journey in the optics and photonics world, we feel grateful and proud. During the past two decades, COL has published more than 4200 papers and 20 special issues that bear important ideas and breakthroughs in optics and photonics. Far beyond its publication, COL has inspired, reached, and served the community via online and offline academic activities, including enlightening trainings, workshops, forums, awarding, and live broadcastings.

As the first-launched optics journal published in English in China, COL made its debut in January 2003. Indexed in SCIE, COL got its first impact factor (IF) of 0.804 in 2010 and hit the journal citation (JCR) list by ranking the second among all SCIE-indexed Asian optics journals. We are waiting for a new impact factor that is expected to be over 3.0 in the coming year 2023, marking another important milestone for the journal.

The optics and photonics world was not a static one and neither was COL. To name a few, COL upgraded to a full page cover and updated the inner format, and appointed new editorial board members to better cover its expanding submission topics. COL opened Fast Track (with a promise of being accepted within 10 days and being published online within 30 days) and started Sister Journal Transfer from another excellent journal, Photonics Research (PR), to attract more manuscripts of high quality.

We truly appreciate the community support for COL as authors, readers, reviewers, editorial members, and advocates. Numerous brilliant worldwide researchers have trusted COL as their friends and submitted their excellent research work to us. That is the core of the success of the journal. The volunteer efforts of the editorial board members and reviewers are critical to ensure the peer review process is smooth and fair while maintaining COL’s high criteria, and vice versa, the journal brings researchers, scientists, and engineers who are actively working in optics, photonics, and related areas together. Nevertheless, COL’s journey and experience in running an English journal shed light on the following optics English journals of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the China Optical Society, and even within the whole of China.

All in all, COL has enjoyed a fruitful journey in the past two decades. We are looking forward, with your continued help, to sowing anew and making COL a home for important and innovative research in optics, photonics, and related disciplines in the next decades.