SCIENCE@home

GBE Editor's Report

Bill Martin,T. Gojobori

Published 2010 in Genome Biology and Evolution

ABSTRACT

The year ending December 2011 was Genome Biology and Evolution’s (GBE) third year of operation. It was another strong year and we are pleased to say that the journal is meeting or exceeding all expectations that we set when Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) embarked upon the endeavor to establish GBE. GBE has the distinction of being the first open access, online-only journal that is owned by an academic society. That circumstance sets GBE apart in an era of scientific publishing that is witnessing dramatic changes in the way that researchers generate and access scientific literature. Several other academic societies have also founded online only, open access journals in the past few years, but a far more novel development has been the rise of commercially owned open access journals, many focused and dedicated to specific fields, including genomics and evolution, others indiscriminate in scope and almost boundless in volume, processing tens of thousands of papers per year. SMBE is a non-profit organization and GBE was not concieved as a product intended to conquer a market share. SMBE is an academic society devoted to furthering the undestanding of the evolutionary process as it is recorded in the sequences of genes and genomes. GBE was designed to provide a service to evolutionary biologists by publishing leading scientific contributions in the field of genome evolution and, by virtue of the vast molecular evolutionary expertise that is concentrated in SMBE, setting academic standards in genome evolutionary investigations. GBE has achieved that goal in its first few years and the future for the field and the journal is bright. Starting in January 2012, we introduced a few minor changes to the appearance of the journal. GBE is now organized as issues, 12 per year, with the aim of organizing our content into a more familiar and readable number of papers per page. We have also introduced Highlights that are short news pieces reporting on papers of particular interest that also reflect the breadth of topics that GBE covers, currently appearing once per issue. George Zhang kindly took on the role of Highlights Editor for GBE and Daniela Venton, a talented freelance science writer, has been writing GBE’s perspectives so far; we hope that readers find them to be an attractive and interesting addition to the journal. Ken Wolfe kindly took on the role of Reviews Editor in order to proactively increase the number of topical reviews submitted to GBE. If you have any suggestions or proposals for timely reviews in the rapidly growing field of genome evolution, please contact Ken directly. The life blood of a journal is a constant stream of high-quality submissions, and that vital statistic has remained excellent at GBE from day 1, a good indicator that SMBE membership and the field in general has firmly embraced GBE as the prime outlet for cutting-edge work in genome evolution. Good evidence to suport that view is our first impact factor, which has come in at 4.62 in June 2012, an excellent mark that was earned by—and attests to—the hard work of the Associate Editors and referees serving the society at GBE. That brings up another point. In this turbulent time of academic publishing, some online only, open access “journals” are publishing on tens of thousands of papers per year and the criteria for publication in some journals tend to focus on the issue of whether the experiments were conducted in a sound manner, combined with a departure from established scientific values such as “are the conclusions supported by the results.” One can debate whether such lucrative pay-to-publish mass information repositories are really scientific journals or not, and whether or not they constitute a source of scientific information more reliable than of an unreferred blog. We are not debating that here, but there is an issue that could be discussed. What we are stating, though, is that in the field of evolutionary biology, specifically in the academic tradition of SMBE and GBE, it is of utmost importance that scientific conclusions be supported by the results upon which they are based, and there is furthermore a very direct connection between the strength of the results that are presented and the strength of the inferences that can be drawn from them. That might seem self-evident, but in the present publishing landscape, it is possible that the rigor of the peer review process is becoming compromised by the expansive tendencies of new journals to grab their share of a new scientific publishing market. Not so at GBE. In fact, GBE was born in part as a reaction to what SMBE recognized as a softening of academic publishing standards in evolutionary biology in the wake of mass data accumulation and aggressive commercial mass publishing. Based on the grass-roots feedback provided by a broad poll of the field with over 2000 responses, we designed GBE to capitalize upon the intellectual assets and the vast evolutionary expertise that exists within SMBE by putting our collective knowledge to use to raise the scientific standards in the field of genome evolution. Papers that finally appear in GBE have been subjected to rigorous peer review by experts in the field of genome evolution. GBE is not striving to publish 25,000 papers per year, it is striving to publish the best papers in the field of genome evolution, thereby setting standards and providing a service to the field of evolutionary biology. We are pleased to say that GBE is continuing to receive submissions of excellent scientific standards and outstanding quality, a profile that we will make all efforts to maintain in the coming year. GBE has been uniformly embraced by the field in all continents, consistent with the international profile of SMBE. Manuscript handling times currently average 5 weeks from submission to first decision, a good mark that can still, however, be improved. In the tradition of the 2011 SMBE meeting in Kyoto, we have implemented a theme cover for the 2012 SMBE meeting in Dublin. Dan Graur did the beautiful artwork, for which we are deeply grateful, as always. We hope to continue this practice of having a theme cover specially desiged by Dan for every meeting, and we hope that SMBE members appreciate the collector’s value of Dan Graur’s artwork. The journal’s web site has been running well, the interactions with our publisher, Oxford University Press, have been efficient and productive. We all owe Lulu Stadler, who runs our Editorial Office, our deep thanks for making sure that everything at the manuscript handling end of the journal is running smoothly. In summary, the journal is sailing smoothly and we are well positioned on a steady course in an exciting and rapidly developing field. In closing, there is one more important thing to say in 2012. This year will mark the end of an era for GBE, and for SMBE more generally. That is because Cathy Kennedy, who has been GBE’s editor, primary contact, business partner, and everything up to fairy godmother at OUP since the GBE planning phases in 2008, and who for the last 11 years has ushered two SMBE journals and 11 SMBE Councils through the transition from tons of air-mailed paper to electronic publishing and through equally major changes in the way the society works, will be retiring in August 2012. Working with Cathy has been simply splendid in every respect and we do not really want to see her go. Although we are confident that OUP will have a kind, competent, patient, and professional replacement in line for Cathy, things will not be at all the same without her. For that reason, we sincerely hope that she will continue to be available to SMBE in some capacity, for those many upcoming occasions in which we might need—as so often in the past—her insightful opinions, trusted experience, and wise advice. But for now, we thank her for her expert, tireless, and dedicated service to SMBE in general, and for helping us launch GBE into its successful starting years in particular.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

  • No references are available for this paper.

Showing 0-0 of 0 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-4 of 4 citing papers · Page 1 of 1