Summary On 16 December 2012, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals gathered at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, CA, USA to discuss current issues related to how the quality of research output is evaluated and how the primary scientific literature is cited. The outcome of the meeting and further discussions is a set of recommendations that is referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, published in May 2013. Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM) fully supports this initiative. In concordance with the recommendations of the Declaration, DMM provides impact factor alongside a variety of other journal-based metrics, requests an author contribution statement for all research articles, places no restrictions on the reuse of reference lists, and has no limitation on the number of references in research articles.