Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Vol. 12, No. 3 (2014) 1471001 (6 pages) # .c Imperial College Press DOI: 10.1142/S0219720014710012
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2003–2013) | A retrospective
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
Frank Eisenhaber*,†,‡,§ and Westley Arthur Sherman*,¶ *Bioinformatics
Institute, Agency for Science Technology and Research 30 Biopolis Street #07-01, Matrix, Singapore 138671 †
Department of Biological Sciences National University of Singapore 8 Medical Drive, Singapore 117597 ‡ School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University 50 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637553 § [email protected] ¶ [email protected]
Received 6 March 2014 Accepted 16 March 2014 Published 14 May 2014 The Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB) started publishing scienti¯c articles in 2003. It has established itself as home for solid research articles in the ¯eld ( 60 per year) that are surprisingly well cited. JBCB has an important function as alternative publishing channel in addition to other, bigger journals. Keywords: Bioinformatics; computational biology; journal.
The event of full human genome sequencing at the beginning of the 21st century had continued to have tremendous in°uence not only on life science itself1 but also in the area of scienti¯c publishing. With more biomolecular sequences and other types of omics data to be analyzed, it was clear that the number of bioinformatics and computational biology papers would increase, both about methodical developments and with regard to biological applications. Not surprisingly, new publishing initiatives such as Biomed Central and PLOS have had bioinformatics/genomics journals in their portfolio since the very beginning. Ming Li, John Wooley, and Limsoon Wong boldly started the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB) with the help of Imperial College Press in Singapore in 2003; and they have been its joint managing editors ever since. The fact alone that JBCB is still here (and both survived ¯nancially and achieved
1471001-1
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
Fig. 1. JBCB papers per year during 2003–2013. Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google. com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). Only full papers were counted but not errata and similar short notes. Except for the ¯rst, the starting year, the total number of papers per year is close to 60 despite some °uctuation.
reputation in the research community) is remarkable. A decade after the launch of JBCB, it appears appropriate now to reconsider previous motivations and to assess the impact of the journal for the scienti¯c community. In the years 2003–2013, JBCB has published 650 articles (Fig. 1). Though there is some °uctuation, about 60 papers reach the scienti¯c community every year via JBCB. Given that JBCB is a boutique journal issued by a publisher who was, at that time, relatively new to the area of life science research and with JBCB operating from a location that people did not traditionally associate with being a stronghold of science, one might believe that the journal would have had some type of wall°ower existence. Nothing is further from the truth. In Table 1, we present data about citations accumulated by JBCB papers over the years: The average citation rates for articles in the ¯rst three years are astonishingly high (above 30). Naturally, the rates decline for younger papers. For those with an age of a couple of years, the rates are something around 10. The values for 2011/ 2012 give us some estimate for the recent impact factor (2 year average citation rate) that should be somewhere between 2.5 and 4.8. For a set of scienti¯c papers to accumulate 10 or more citations in the life time on average implicates that the typical JBCB paper has had a very positive welcome in the scienti¯c community and the publications are perceived as communicating solid, interesting science. This is the more remarkable since (i) JBCB publishes almost exclusively primary research papers but rarely reviews or other, generally more widely read items, (ii) the bioinformatics/computational biology community is not very numerous and (iii) it is known that even the most established journals in this ¯eld hardly manage to overcome the threshold of ¯ve in the impact factor ranking. 1471001-2
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
Table 1. Data about the citation of JBCB papers accumulated from the time point of their publication until writing of this manuscript in March 2014 (life time citation rates). Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed). The citation numbers are a snapshot from 4 March 2014. Year
Number of papers
Number of citations
Citations per paper
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
28 50 74 76 69 64 52 70 48 55 61
1263 1562 2497 1055 704 545 499 566 229 139 82
45.1 31.2 33.7 13.9 10.2 8.5 9.6 9.1 4.8 2.5 1.3
There are eleven JBCB papers that accumulated 100 and more citations in their life time (until the snapshot date 14 February 2014, see Table 2). Notably, there are two papers authored by S. Imoto and colleagues among these citation classics.8,13 Congratulations! Clearly, method papers are the majority among the highly cited papers. Those of us who have seen the earlier years of bioinformatics (1980–2000) might remember that publishing computerized methods and results
Table 2. Most highly cited JBCB papers (life time citation rates). Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). The citation numbers are a snapshot from 4 March 2014. Citations
Publication year
PMID
References
Title
722
2005
15852500
2
209
2003
15290783
3
208 199
2005 2004
15852513 15359419
4 and 5 6
198 198
2005 2004
16108083 15272434
7 8
147
2005
15751111
9
140 139
2004 2005
15272438 16108090
10 11
138
2003
15290779
12
120
2003
15290771
13
Minimum redundancy feature selection from. . . RAPTOR: Optimal protein threading by linear. . . Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale. . . PatternHunter II: Highly sensitive and fast. . . Pro¯le-based string kernels for remote. . . Combining microarrays and biological knowledge. . . Optimizing long intrinsic disorder predictors. . . Optimal, e±cient reconstruction of. . . SPIDER: Software for protein identi¯cation. . . E±cient reconstruction of haplotype structure. . . Bayesian network and nonparametric. . .
1471001-3
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
achieved with them was not an easy task in traditional life science journals and it is satisfying to observe that they actually draw a considerable audience. The founding of JBCB coincided with the dramatic strengthening of serious life science research in Singapore and in other countries in the Asia-Paci¯c region as well as with e®orts of enhanced international research integration of the Japanese community.14–16 One might believe that JBCB has served mainly the local, Asia-Paci¯c bioinformatics research community since it might have needed some protected environment at the beginning. The data about the country of origin of the corresponding author (Table 3) shows that, on the one hand, JBCB has indeed helped the local research community to mature. For example, JBCB has become the prime medium for publishing papers from several high-pro¯le Asian conferences such as GIW.16 But, on the other hand, JBCB was a publisher for papers from research groups located all over the globe from the ¯rst year on. For example, NorthAmerican and European submissions (from the US and also from Canada) constitute a large share of all articles published in JBCB (Table 3). Despite the common features of serious scienti¯c journals such as ethical codes and rigorous peer review, there is a trend that certain circles of scienti¯c groups condense around a given journal and the personality of editors and procedures in°uence reviewer selection, weighing of arguments and counter-arguments and, ¯nally, the selection of the manuscripts that ¯nally get published. Especially editorial considerations of whether an article constitutes \general interest" for the readership bring in quite some arbitrariness in the process. The hunt after high impact factors (and the corresponding economic advantages associated with it in the current scheme of science quality evaluation) might drive journals to publish articles on fashionable topics gathering large audiences. This is used to justify rejection of manuscripts with
Table 3. Distribution of JBCB papers by the country of origin of the corresponding author. Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmed). We list the top ¯ve nations together with the number of articles (in parentheses) separately for the years 2003–2013. The codes are: AU Australia, CA Canada, CN China, DE Germany, FR France, GB Great Britain, IN India, JP Japan, RU Russia, SG Singapore, US United States of America. Clearly, most of the articles have been submitted from the United States of America. Year
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
US (11) US (15) US (25) US (20) US (25) US (25) US (23) US (17) US (19) US (29) US (8)
JP (4) CA (10) JP (7) RU (17) RU (10) RU (12) CA (5) CN (12) CN (6) RU (5) DE (6)
SG (3) JP (8) CN (6) CA (8) JP (4) CA (4) CN (4) RU (11) JP (4) SG (4) SG (6)
CA (3) CN (4) SG (6) JP (8) DE (4) JP (4) JP (3) JP (10) DE (3) FR (4) RU (5)
FR (2) DE (2) CA (5) CN (6) CN (4) CN (3) GB (2) GB (4) AU (2) IN (3) CN (5)
1471001-4
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
novel, yet so far not mainstream approaches and results. The chances for papers from emerging research ¯elds with small communities are dim in such journals. There is hardly an experienced scientist who cannot entertain an evening gathering with stories about strange reviewer comments or astonishing editorial decisions as rare public outcries certify.17–19 Thus, alternatives for publishing are instrumental for diversity in science to survive. This is the major reason why JBCB is needed. In the Asian context where all and everybody are hunting after branded items and titles, the calm, equilibrated, sober, one might even say, traditional way of managing the journal might look like an oddity. So far, publishing decisions were exclusively guided by scienti¯c considerations and JBCB has still three managing editors who are personally reachable for all authors. It is exactly this style why JBCB provides an indispensable contribution to the functioning of theoretical life science research community and beyond. We wish JBCB a long life and a successful future! References 1. Eisenhaber F, A decade after the ¯rst full human genome sequencing: When will we understand our own genome? J Bioinform Comput Biol 10:1271001, 2012. 2. Ding C, Peng H, Minimum redundancy feature selection from microarray gene expression data, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:185–205, 2005. 3. Xu J, Li M, Kim D, Xu Y, RAPTOR: Optimal protein threading by linear programming, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:95–117, 2003. 4. Ramsey S, Orrell D, Bolouri H, Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale genetic regulatory networks (supplementary material), J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:437–454, 2005. 5. Ramsey S, Orrell D, Bolouri H, Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale genetic regulatory networks, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:415–436, 2005. 6. Li M, Ma B, Kisman D, Tromp J, Patternhunter II: Highly sensitive and fast homology search, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:417–439, 2004. 7. Kuang R, Ie E, Wang K, Wang K, Siddiqi M, Freund Y, Leslie C, Pro¯le-based string kernels for remote homology detection and motif extraction, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:527–550, 2005. 8. Imoto S, Higuchi T, Goto T, Tashiro K, Kuhara S, Miyano S, Combining microarrays and biological knowledge for estimating gene networks via bayesian networks, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:77–98, 2004. 9. Peng K, Vucetic S, Radivojac P, Brown CJ, Dunker AK, Obradovic Z, Optimizing long intrinsic disorder predictors with protein evolutionary information, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:35–60, 2005. 10. Gus¯eld D, Eddhu S, Langley C, Optimal, e±cient reconstruction of phylogenetic networks with constrained recombination, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:173–213, 2004. 11. Han Y, Ma B, Zhang K, SPIDER: Software for protein identi¯cation from sequence tags with de novo sequencing error, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:697–716, 2005. 12. Eskin E, Halperin E, Karp RM, E±cient reconstruction of haplotype structure via perfect phylogeny, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:1–20, 2003. 13. Imoto S, Kim S, Goto T, Miyano S, Aburatani S, Tashiro K, Kuhara S, Bayesian network and nonparametric heteroscedastic regression for nonlinear modeling of genetic network, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:231–252, 2003. 1471001-5
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
14. Wong L, Eisenhaber F, Unix interfaces, Kleisli, bucandin structure, etc. The heroic beginning of bioinformatics in Singapore, J Bioinform Comput Biol 12:1471002, 2014. 15. Eisenhaber F, Kwoh CK, Ng SK, Sung WK, Wong L, Brief overview of bioinformatics activities in Singapore, PLoS Comput Biol 5:e1000508, 2009. 16. Eisenhaber F, Sung WK, Wong L, The 24th International Conference on Genome Informatics, GIW2013, in Singapore, J Bioinform Comput Biol 11:1302003, 2013. 17. Ploegh H, End the wasteful tyranny of reviewer experiments, Nature 472:391, 2011. 18. Petsko GA, The one new journal we might actually need, Genome Biol 12:129, 2011. 19. Walbot V, Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts? J Biol 8:24, 2009.
Frank Eisenhaber studied mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin and biophysics and medicine at the Pirogov Medical University in Moscow (M.D. in 1985). He received Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow (1988). After postdoctoral work at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Berlin-Buch (1989–1991) and at the EMBL in Heidelberg (1991–1999), he worked as teamleader of the bioinformatics research group and head of the general IT department at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna (1999–2007). Since August 2007, he is the Director of the Bioinformatics Institute A*STAR Singapore.
Westley Arthur Sherman did his B.Sc. in biology at the MIT in Cambridge/Boston (1995) and Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan (2002). This was followed by a postdoctoral position at the Keck Graduate Institute (Clermont Colleges/California) and, since 2010, he has joined the Bioinformatics Institute where he is currently working as a research scientist. His scienti¯c interest is focused on the analysis of biomolecular sequences and the interpretation of mutational changes in terms of biomolecular mechanism with relevance to human disease.
1471001-6
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2003–2013) | A retrospective
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
Frank Eisenhaber*,†,‡,§ and Westley Arthur Sherman*,¶ *Bioinformatics
Institute, Agency for Science Technology and Research 30 Biopolis Street #07-01, Matrix, Singapore 138671 †
Department of Biological Sciences National University of Singapore 8 Medical Drive, Singapore 117597 ‡ School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University 50 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637553 § [email protected] ¶ [email protected]
Received 6 March 2014 Accepted 16 March 2014 Published 14 May 2014 The Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB) started publishing scienti¯c articles in 2003. It has established itself as home for solid research articles in the ¯eld ( 60 per year) that are surprisingly well cited. JBCB has an important function as alternative publishing channel in addition to other, bigger journals. Keywords: Bioinformatics; computational biology; journal.
The event of full human genome sequencing at the beginning of the 21st century had continued to have tremendous in°uence not only on life science itself1 but also in the area of scienti¯c publishing. With more biomolecular sequences and other types of omics data to be analyzed, it was clear that the number of bioinformatics and computational biology papers would increase, both about methodical developments and with regard to biological applications. Not surprisingly, new publishing initiatives such as Biomed Central and PLOS have had bioinformatics/genomics journals in their portfolio since the very beginning. Ming Li, John Wooley, and Limsoon Wong boldly started the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB) with the help of Imperial College Press in Singapore in 2003; and they have been its joint managing editors ever since. The fact alone that JBCB is still here (and both survived ¯nancially and achieved
1471001-1
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
Fig. 1. JBCB papers per year during 2003–2013. Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google. com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). Only full papers were counted but not errata and similar short notes. Except for the ¯rst, the starting year, the total number of papers per year is close to 60 despite some °uctuation.
reputation in the research community) is remarkable. A decade after the launch of JBCB, it appears appropriate now to reconsider previous motivations and to assess the impact of the journal for the scienti¯c community. In the years 2003–2013, JBCB has published 650 articles (Fig. 1). Though there is some °uctuation, about 60 papers reach the scienti¯c community every year via JBCB. Given that JBCB is a boutique journal issued by a publisher who was, at that time, relatively new to the area of life science research and with JBCB operating from a location that people did not traditionally associate with being a stronghold of science, one might believe that the journal would have had some type of wall°ower existence. Nothing is further from the truth. In Table 1, we present data about citations accumulated by JBCB papers over the years: The average citation rates for articles in the ¯rst three years are astonishingly high (above 30). Naturally, the rates decline for younger papers. For those with an age of a couple of years, the rates are something around 10. The values for 2011/ 2012 give us some estimate for the recent impact factor (2 year average citation rate) that should be somewhere between 2.5 and 4.8. For a set of scienti¯c papers to accumulate 10 or more citations in the life time on average implicates that the typical JBCB paper has had a very positive welcome in the scienti¯c community and the publications are perceived as communicating solid, interesting science. This is the more remarkable since (i) JBCB publishes almost exclusively primary research papers but rarely reviews or other, generally more widely read items, (ii) the bioinformatics/computational biology community is not very numerous and (iii) it is known that even the most established journals in this ¯eld hardly manage to overcome the threshold of ¯ve in the impact factor ranking. 1471001-2
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
Table 1. Data about the citation of JBCB papers accumulated from the time point of their publication until writing of this manuscript in March 2014 (life time citation rates). Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed). The citation numbers are a snapshot from 4 March 2014. Year
Number of papers
Number of citations
Citations per paper
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
28 50 74 76 69 64 52 70 48 55 61
1263 1562 2497 1055 704 545 499 566 229 139 82
45.1 31.2 33.7 13.9 10.2 8.5 9.6 9.1 4.8 2.5 1.3
There are eleven JBCB papers that accumulated 100 and more citations in their life time (until the snapshot date 14 February 2014, see Table 2). Notably, there are two papers authored by S. Imoto and colleagues among these citation classics.8,13 Congratulations! Clearly, method papers are the majority among the highly cited papers. Those of us who have seen the earlier years of bioinformatics (1980–2000) might remember that publishing computerized methods and results
Table 2. Most highly cited JBCB papers (life time citation rates). Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). The citation numbers are a snapshot from 4 March 2014. Citations
Publication year
PMID
References
Title
722
2005
15852500
2
209
2003
15290783
3
208 199
2005 2004
15852513 15359419
4 and 5 6
198 198
2005 2004
16108083 15272434
7 8
147
2005
15751111
9
140 139
2004 2005
15272438 16108090
10 11
138
2003
15290779
12
120
2003
15290771
13
Minimum redundancy feature selection from. . . RAPTOR: Optimal protein threading by linear. . . Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale. . . PatternHunter II: Highly sensitive and fast. . . Pro¯le-based string kernels for remote. . . Combining microarrays and biological knowledge. . . Optimizing long intrinsic disorder predictors. . . Optimal, e±cient reconstruction of. . . SPIDER: Software for protein identi¯cation. . . E±cient reconstruction of haplotype structure. . . Bayesian network and nonparametric. . .
1471001-3
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
achieved with them was not an easy task in traditional life science journals and it is satisfying to observe that they actually draw a considerable audience. The founding of JBCB coincided with the dramatic strengthening of serious life science research in Singapore and in other countries in the Asia-Paci¯c region as well as with e®orts of enhanced international research integration of the Japanese community.14–16 One might believe that JBCB has served mainly the local, Asia-Paci¯c bioinformatics research community since it might have needed some protected environment at the beginning. The data about the country of origin of the corresponding author (Table 3) shows that, on the one hand, JBCB has indeed helped the local research community to mature. For example, JBCB has become the prime medium for publishing papers from several high-pro¯le Asian conferences such as GIW.16 But, on the other hand, JBCB was a publisher for papers from research groups located all over the globe from the ¯rst year on. For example, NorthAmerican and European submissions (from the US and also from Canada) constitute a large share of all articles published in JBCB (Table 3). Despite the common features of serious scienti¯c journals such as ethical codes and rigorous peer review, there is a trend that certain circles of scienti¯c groups condense around a given journal and the personality of editors and procedures in°uence reviewer selection, weighing of arguments and counter-arguments and, ¯nally, the selection of the manuscripts that ¯nally get published. Especially editorial considerations of whether an article constitutes \general interest" for the readership bring in quite some arbitrariness in the process. The hunt after high impact factors (and the corresponding economic advantages associated with it in the current scheme of science quality evaluation) might drive journals to publish articles on fashionable topics gathering large audiences. This is used to justify rejection of manuscripts with
Table 3. Distribution of JBCB papers by the country of origin of the corresponding author. Data was recovered from Google Scholar (scholar.google.com.sg) and PUBMED (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmed). We list the top ¯ve nations together with the number of articles (in parentheses) separately for the years 2003–2013. The codes are: AU Australia, CA Canada, CN China, DE Germany, FR France, GB Great Britain, IN India, JP Japan, RU Russia, SG Singapore, US United States of America. Clearly, most of the articles have been submitted from the United States of America. Year
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
US (11) US (15) US (25) US (20) US (25) US (25) US (23) US (17) US (19) US (29) US (8)
JP (4) CA (10) JP (7) RU (17) RU (10) RU (12) CA (5) CN (12) CN (6) RU (5) DE (6)
SG (3) JP (8) CN (6) CA (8) JP (4) CA (4) CN (4) RU (11) JP (4) SG (4) SG (6)
CA (3) CN (4) SG (6) JP (8) DE (4) JP (4) JP (3) JP (10) DE (3) FR (4) RU (5)
FR (2) DE (2) CA (5) CN (6) CN (4) CN (3) GB (2) GB (4) AU (2) IN (3) CN (5)
1471001-4
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
10 years for the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
novel, yet so far not mainstream approaches and results. The chances for papers from emerging research ¯elds with small communities are dim in such journals. There is hardly an experienced scientist who cannot entertain an evening gathering with stories about strange reviewer comments or astonishing editorial decisions as rare public outcries certify.17–19 Thus, alternatives for publishing are instrumental for diversity in science to survive. This is the major reason why JBCB is needed. In the Asian context where all and everybody are hunting after branded items and titles, the calm, equilibrated, sober, one might even say, traditional way of managing the journal might look like an oddity. So far, publishing decisions were exclusively guided by scienti¯c considerations and JBCB has still three managing editors who are personally reachable for all authors. It is exactly this style why JBCB provides an indispensable contribution to the functioning of theoretical life science research community and beyond. We wish JBCB a long life and a successful future! References 1. Eisenhaber F, A decade after the ¯rst full human genome sequencing: When will we understand our own genome? J Bioinform Comput Biol 10:1271001, 2012. 2. Ding C, Peng H, Minimum redundancy feature selection from microarray gene expression data, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:185–205, 2005. 3. Xu J, Li M, Kim D, Xu Y, RAPTOR: Optimal protein threading by linear programming, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:95–117, 2003. 4. Ramsey S, Orrell D, Bolouri H, Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale genetic regulatory networks (supplementary material), J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:437–454, 2005. 5. Ramsey S, Orrell D, Bolouri H, Dizzy: Stochastic simulation of large-scale genetic regulatory networks, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:415–436, 2005. 6. Li M, Ma B, Kisman D, Tromp J, Patternhunter II: Highly sensitive and fast homology search, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:417–439, 2004. 7. Kuang R, Ie E, Wang K, Wang K, Siddiqi M, Freund Y, Leslie C, Pro¯le-based string kernels for remote homology detection and motif extraction, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:527–550, 2005. 8. Imoto S, Higuchi T, Goto T, Tashiro K, Kuhara S, Miyano S, Combining microarrays and biological knowledge for estimating gene networks via bayesian networks, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:77–98, 2004. 9. Peng K, Vucetic S, Radivojac P, Brown CJ, Dunker AK, Obradovic Z, Optimizing long intrinsic disorder predictors with protein evolutionary information, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:35–60, 2005. 10. Gus¯eld D, Eddhu S, Langley C, Optimal, e±cient reconstruction of phylogenetic networks with constrained recombination, J Bioinform Comput Biol 2:173–213, 2004. 11. Han Y, Ma B, Zhang K, SPIDER: Software for protein identi¯cation from sequence tags with de novo sequencing error, J Bioinform Comput Biol 3:697–716, 2005. 12. Eskin E, Halperin E, Karp RM, E±cient reconstruction of haplotype structure via perfect phylogeny, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:1–20, 2003. 13. Imoto S, Kim S, Goto T, Miyano S, Aburatani S, Tashiro K, Kuhara S, Bayesian network and nonparametric heteroscedastic regression for nonlinear modeling of genetic network, J Bioinform Comput Biol 1:231–252, 2003. 1471001-5
F. Eisenhaber & W. A. Sherman
J. Bioinform. Comput. Biol. 2014.12. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF LAVAL on 07/01/14. For personal use only.
14. Wong L, Eisenhaber F, Unix interfaces, Kleisli, bucandin structure, etc. The heroic beginning of bioinformatics in Singapore, J Bioinform Comput Biol 12:1471002, 2014. 15. Eisenhaber F, Kwoh CK, Ng SK, Sung WK, Wong L, Brief overview of bioinformatics activities in Singapore, PLoS Comput Biol 5:e1000508, 2009. 16. Eisenhaber F, Sung WK, Wong L, The 24th International Conference on Genome Informatics, GIW2013, in Singapore, J Bioinform Comput Biol 11:1302003, 2013. 17. Ploegh H, End the wasteful tyranny of reviewer experiments, Nature 472:391, 2011. 18. Petsko GA, The one new journal we might actually need, Genome Biol 12:129, 2011. 19. Walbot V, Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts? J Biol 8:24, 2009.
Frank Eisenhaber studied mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin and biophysics and medicine at the Pirogov Medical University in Moscow (M.D. in 1985). He received Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow (1988). After postdoctoral work at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Berlin-Buch (1989–1991) and at the EMBL in Heidelberg (1991–1999), he worked as teamleader of the bioinformatics research group and head of the general IT department at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna (1999–2007). Since August 2007, he is the Director of the Bioinformatics Institute A*STAR Singapore.
Westley Arthur Sherman did his B.Sc. in biology at the MIT in Cambridge/Boston (1995) and Ph.D. in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan (2002). This was followed by a postdoctoral position at the Keck Graduate Institute (Clermont Colleges/California) and, since 2010, he has joined the Bioinformatics Institute where he is currently working as a research scientist. His scienti¯c interest is focused on the analysis of biomolecular sequences and the interpretation of mutational changes in terms of biomolecular mechanism with relevance to human disease.
1471001-6
