As the year is drawing to a close, it is time to look back at the past months of E&G Quaternary Science Journal (EGQSJ), as well as to shed some light on future plans for the journal. As we all know, 2020 has turned out to be a year of ever so unexpected challenges, affecting the lives of people on a global scale. With Quaternary research being closely linked to fieldwork and being a scientific discipline characterised by a high level of interdisciplinarity, working under conditions of a global pandemic has demanded a high effort of the Quaternary scientific community to keep going forward. Especially under these circumstances, we would like to express our great gratitude to everybody involved in the making of this year's again very successful volume of EGQSJ.

Volume 69 covers a broad variety of topics related to Quaternary research, including, among others, topics dealing with geomorphology, chronology and dynamics of glacial systems, paleo-environmental reconstructions based on multidisciplinary investigations of a broad range of paleo-environmental archives, and last but not least, innovative geo-archaeological studies from sites in Europe and beyond. The latter includes the first papers of a currently running special issue pooling recent results of state-of-the-art geo-archaeological studies from different regions of the Nile Delta.

With volume 69 now closed, the next volume will mark the 70th anniversary of EGQSJ, and a very special issue dedicated to both the history and future of the journal will recognise this. A team recruited from the DEUQUA (German Quaternary Association) board had been going through the archives of EGQSJ and, while doing so, recognised that especially in the early decades of EGQSJ, a significant number of conceptual benchmark papers were published, which still have relevance in their respective fields today. Unfortunately, these papers were only published in German, which led to the following idea: 12 benchmark papers will be translated into English; all figures will be redrawn in a modern fashion; and these will be made available on the publishing platform of Copernicus Publications via the journal DEUQUA Special Publications (DEUQUASP, https://www.deuqua-special-publications.net/). International experts in the respective fields will put all the translated manuscripts into today's state-of-the-art context, and these contextualisations will be peer-reviewed and published in a special issue of EGQSJ. In addition, the translations published in DEUQUASP, the contextualisations published in EGQSJ, and the original (German) papers in the back catalogue of EGQSJ will all be linked digitally – choose one, get three for free, because all will of course be open-access.

Apart from the anniversary plans, upcoming publications are already scheduled for early 2021, so we are looking forward to continuing on the successful path the journal has taken during recent years. Many thanks again to all who have contributed their time and effort to make this happen, and please do not forget: submission of manuscripts is always possible via the website of EGQSJ (https://www.eg-quaternary-science-journal.net/). Apart from all Quaternary science- and research-related topics, we truly hope that 2021 will turn out to be a much brighter year for all of us.