A priority paper providing an expert perspective on coronaviruses, which is free-to-access for all, has just been published in our journal Pathogens and Disease. The authors are Cristiano Salata, Arianna Calistri, Cristina Parolin, and Giorgio Palù, former president of the European Society of Virology.

This perspective is intended to provide a reliable source of trusted expert commentary on the novel type of coronavirus infecting humans that first appeared in Wuhan, China, at the end of December 2019.

The disease has now been named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), but this name had not been decided on acceptance of this paper, in which the moniker 2019-nCoV is used. This paper took just 10 days from submission to publication online.

The Editors-in-Chief of Pathogens and Disease are Dr Wilhelmina Huston, Dr Alfredo Garzino-Demo, and Dr Jörn Coers.