Normally, the opening of submissions for a magazine is not unusual news. In the case of Realms of Fantasy it is due to their drama of the last year: closing of the magazine, rumors of the sale of the magazine, sale of and reopening of the magazine. And for the last seven months or so since resuming publication, they've been consuming the stories that they already had in the pipeline before they closed, which I'm sure the authors appreciated. So...good luck from FFO!

Thanks to SFscope for the lead to this article, which has a link to the assistant editor's blog article on RoL's reopening to submissions.