FEBS Letters 589 (2015) 1–2
journal homepage: www.FEBSLetters.org
Editorial News
Making an impact: FEBS Open Bio celebrates its 3rd anniversary This year has been an exciting one for the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), which was founded 50 years ago in 1964 [1]. As the 50th anniversary of FEBS draws to a close, there is another anniversary to mark – the launch three years ago of the newest member in the FEBS journal family: FEBS Open Bio. Journal publishing has been a core activity of FEBS from the very beginning. FEBS was only three years old when it launched the European Journal of Biochemistry (the original title of The FEBS Journal) in 1967, closely followed by FEBS Letters in 1968. These two journals rapidly grew into influential and respected forums for the dissemination of primary papers and reviews in biochemistry and molecular biology. The popularity of The FEBS Journal and FEBS Letters within the scientific community and their consequent financial success have enabled FEBS to run numerous scientific meetings and training courses and to broaden its activities, promoting the molecular life sciences in Europe and beyond. More recently (in 2007), FEBS launched a new journal, Molecular Oncology, to serve the cancer community and this has also been a resounding success. Responding to the growing interest in, and demand for, open access publishing, FEBS felt that the time was right to extend its portfolio once again in 2011 when it launched FEBS Open Bio, in partnership with Elsevier. The journal is published online only, with free access of all content to all readers. Authors of accepted articles are charged a fee towards the costs of publication; a policy is in place to assist those who do not have funding for such charges. With the emergence of numerous open-access journals of variable quality in recent years [2], FEBS was keen that FEBS Open Bio should adhere to the same rigorous standards of peer review as its sister journals. The founding editorial board was formed from members of the editorial boards of The FEBS Journal, FEBS Letters and Molecular Oncology, with the appointment of additional editors as the journal has grown. While its sister journals select papers for their impact, the focus of the peer review process for FEBS Open Bio is on the technical soundness of manuscripts, leaving the assessment of their impact and biological significance to the scientific community. This puts FEBS Open Bio in the category of ‘megajournals’ [3] such as PLOS One and Scientific Reports. The scope of FEBS Open Bio is broad, covering all of the molecular and cellular life sciences. Some of the most highly downloaded and cited papers published so far have included bioinformatics studies [4,5], a report of a bacteriocin against both Gram-negative and -positive bacteria [6], an analysis of the ATAF1 transcription factor, which plays important roles in plant development and adaptation to environmental stress [7], and a kinetic analysis of the clinical anti-cancer candidate PG545 [8]. Submission of novel
and innovative work is of course greatly encouraged, but papers describing solid science in developing fields or extending knowledge from one organism to another are also considered. FEBS Open Bio is also keen to receive papers reporting negative results, which are a valuable service to the community by avoiding the unnecessary duplication of effort and wasting of resources. In addition to direct submissions, articles originally submitted to other FEBS journals, which the Editors of those journals judge to be scientifically sound but of insufficient general interest, can be transferred to FEBS Open Bio. The reviews solicited by the Editors of the original journals are transferred along with the manuscript, thus conserving the peer review process and offering authors a fast-track alternative for publication of their paper. FEBS Open Bio prides itself on both rapid peer review and publication, and publishes these and other metrics on its home page (see http://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/2211-5463). The average time to first decision was 3.2 weeks in 2013, and articles are published online within a week of acceptance. FEBS Open Bio assists authors in sharing their data. The HTML versions of articles include hyperlinks to data deposited in publicly available databases and structural data can be viewed within articles using the Protein Viewer, as in this report on the structure and function of a fasciclin I (FAS1) domain protein [9]. Authors are encouraged to include usable data sets as supplementary materials, such as for this highly downloaded paper describing mRNA and miRNA transcriptomes for nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell lines [10]. Authors of articles in FEBS Open Bio retain copyright and are able to post additional copies of the final version of their manuscript on any website of their choice, thus ensuring the widest possible audience for their work. FEBS Open Bio is already indexed in Chemical Abstracts, EMBASE, Exerpta Medica, Scopus, PubMed, PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central. We are pleased to announce that Thomson Reuters has now accepted the journal for indexing in Science Citation Index Expanded (accessed through Web of Science), Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews. Inclusion in Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition means that FEBS Open Bio will receive an Impact Factor for 2014 in the summer of 2015. While welcoming the forthcoming award of an Impact Factor as a mark of the quality of the journal as a whole, FEBS Open Bio is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a set of recommendations that calls for the ‘need to assess research on its merits rather than on the basis of the Impact Factor of the journal in which the research is published’ [11]. Citation data is available on individual articles published in FEBS Open Bio and authors have access to a ‘dashboard’ providing other metrics of the impact of their article (see http://www.elsevier.com/connect/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2014.11.035 0014-5793/Ó 2014 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2
Editorial News / FEBS Letters 589 (2015) 1–2
article-usage-reports-enable-authors-to-track-downloads-andviews). As the 2014 volume closes, FEBS Open Bio has already published over 250 articles. We look forward to an even busier 2015 and hope that you will consider FEBS Open Bio when looking to publish your next paper. References [1] Perham, R.N. and Purton, M.E., Eds., (2014). FEBS at 50: Half a Century Promoting the Molecular Life Sciences, TMI, London. [2] Bohannon, J. (2013) Who is afraid of peer view? Science 342, 60–65. [3] Binfield, P (2013) Open Access Megajournals – Have They Changed Everything? http://circleubc.ca/handle/2429/45605. [4] Kumar, A., Rajendran, V., Sethumadhavan, R. and Purohit, R. (2012) In silico prediction of a disease-associated STIL mutant and its affect on the recruitment of centromere protein J (CENPJ). FEBS Open Bio 2, 285–293. [5] Araki, H., Knapp, C., Tsai, P. and Print, C. (2012) GeneSetDB: a comprehensive meta-database, statistical and visualisation framework for gene set analysis. FEBS Open Bio 2, 76–82. [6] Acuña, L., Picariello, G., Sesma, F., Morero, R.D. and Bellomio, A. (2012) A new hybrid bacteriocin, Ent35–MccV, displays antimicrobial activity against pathogenic Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. FEBS Open Bio 2, 12–19. [7] Jensen, M.K., Lindemose, S., de Masi, F., Reimer, J.J., Nielsen, M., Perera, V., Workman, C.T., Turck, F., Grant, M.R., Mundy, J., Petersen, M. and Skriver, K. (2013) ATAF1 transcription factor directly regulates abscisic acid biosynthetic gene NCED3 in Arabidopsis thaliana. FEBS Open Bio 3, 321–327.
[8] Hammond, E., Handley, P., Dredge, K. and Bytheway, I. (2013) Mechanisms of heparanase inhibition by the heparan sulfate mimetic PG545 and three structural analogues. FEBS Open Bio 3, 346–351. [9] Moody, R.G. and Williamson, M.P. (2013) Structure and function of a bacterial Fasciclin I Domain Protein elucidates function of related cell adhesion proteins such as TGFBIp and periostin. FEBS Open Bio 3, 71–77. [10] Szeto, C.Y.-Y., Lin, C.H., Choi, S.C., Yip, T.T.C., Ngan, R.K.-C., Tsao, G.S.-W. and Lung, M.L. (2014) Integrated mRNA and microRNA transcriptome sequencing characterizes sequence variants and mRNA-microRNA regulatory network in nasopharyngeal carcinoma model systems. FEBS Open Bio 4, 128–140. [11] The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) http:// am.ascb.org/dora/.
Mary Purton is Executive Editor of FEBS Open Bio. She obtained her PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of Nottingham and has spent the last 30 years in science publishing, working on various journals, including Trends in Biochemical Sciences and Nature, and has also edited numerous books.
Mary Purton FEBS Open Bio Editorial Office, Cambridge, UK E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 29 November 2014
journal homepage: www.FEBSLetters.org
Editorial News
Making an impact: FEBS Open Bio celebrates its 3rd anniversary This year has been an exciting one for the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), which was founded 50 years ago in 1964 [1]. As the 50th anniversary of FEBS draws to a close, there is another anniversary to mark – the launch three years ago of the newest member in the FEBS journal family: FEBS Open Bio. Journal publishing has been a core activity of FEBS from the very beginning. FEBS was only three years old when it launched the European Journal of Biochemistry (the original title of The FEBS Journal) in 1967, closely followed by FEBS Letters in 1968. These two journals rapidly grew into influential and respected forums for the dissemination of primary papers and reviews in biochemistry and molecular biology. The popularity of The FEBS Journal and FEBS Letters within the scientific community and their consequent financial success have enabled FEBS to run numerous scientific meetings and training courses and to broaden its activities, promoting the molecular life sciences in Europe and beyond. More recently (in 2007), FEBS launched a new journal, Molecular Oncology, to serve the cancer community and this has also been a resounding success. Responding to the growing interest in, and demand for, open access publishing, FEBS felt that the time was right to extend its portfolio once again in 2011 when it launched FEBS Open Bio, in partnership with Elsevier. The journal is published online only, with free access of all content to all readers. Authors of accepted articles are charged a fee towards the costs of publication; a policy is in place to assist those who do not have funding for such charges. With the emergence of numerous open-access journals of variable quality in recent years [2], FEBS was keen that FEBS Open Bio should adhere to the same rigorous standards of peer review as its sister journals. The founding editorial board was formed from members of the editorial boards of The FEBS Journal, FEBS Letters and Molecular Oncology, with the appointment of additional editors as the journal has grown. While its sister journals select papers for their impact, the focus of the peer review process for FEBS Open Bio is on the technical soundness of manuscripts, leaving the assessment of their impact and biological significance to the scientific community. This puts FEBS Open Bio in the category of ‘megajournals’ [3] such as PLOS One and Scientific Reports. The scope of FEBS Open Bio is broad, covering all of the molecular and cellular life sciences. Some of the most highly downloaded and cited papers published so far have included bioinformatics studies [4,5], a report of a bacteriocin against both Gram-negative and -positive bacteria [6], an analysis of the ATAF1 transcription factor, which plays important roles in plant development and adaptation to environmental stress [7], and a kinetic analysis of the clinical anti-cancer candidate PG545 [8]. Submission of novel
and innovative work is of course greatly encouraged, but papers describing solid science in developing fields or extending knowledge from one organism to another are also considered. FEBS Open Bio is also keen to receive papers reporting negative results, which are a valuable service to the community by avoiding the unnecessary duplication of effort and wasting of resources. In addition to direct submissions, articles originally submitted to other FEBS journals, which the Editors of those journals judge to be scientifically sound but of insufficient general interest, can be transferred to FEBS Open Bio. The reviews solicited by the Editors of the original journals are transferred along with the manuscript, thus conserving the peer review process and offering authors a fast-track alternative for publication of their paper. FEBS Open Bio prides itself on both rapid peer review and publication, and publishes these and other metrics on its home page (see http://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/2211-5463). The average time to first decision was 3.2 weeks in 2013, and articles are published online within a week of acceptance. FEBS Open Bio assists authors in sharing their data. The HTML versions of articles include hyperlinks to data deposited in publicly available databases and structural data can be viewed within articles using the Protein Viewer, as in this report on the structure and function of a fasciclin I (FAS1) domain protein [9]. Authors are encouraged to include usable data sets as supplementary materials, such as for this highly downloaded paper describing mRNA and miRNA transcriptomes for nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell lines [10]. Authors of articles in FEBS Open Bio retain copyright and are able to post additional copies of the final version of their manuscript on any website of their choice, thus ensuring the widest possible audience for their work. FEBS Open Bio is already indexed in Chemical Abstracts, EMBASE, Exerpta Medica, Scopus, PubMed, PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central. We are pleased to announce that Thomson Reuters has now accepted the journal for indexing in Science Citation Index Expanded (accessed through Web of Science), Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews. Inclusion in Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition means that FEBS Open Bio will receive an Impact Factor for 2014 in the summer of 2015. While welcoming the forthcoming award of an Impact Factor as a mark of the quality of the journal as a whole, FEBS Open Bio is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a set of recommendations that calls for the ‘need to assess research on its merits rather than on the basis of the Impact Factor of the journal in which the research is published’ [11]. Citation data is available on individual articles published in FEBS Open Bio and authors have access to a ‘dashboard’ providing other metrics of the impact of their article (see http://www.elsevier.com/connect/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2014.11.035 0014-5793/Ó 2014 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2
Editorial News / FEBS Letters 589 (2015) 1–2
article-usage-reports-enable-authors-to-track-downloads-andviews). As the 2014 volume closes, FEBS Open Bio has already published over 250 articles. We look forward to an even busier 2015 and hope that you will consider FEBS Open Bio when looking to publish your next paper. References [1] Perham, R.N. and Purton, M.E., Eds., (2014). FEBS at 50: Half a Century Promoting the Molecular Life Sciences, TMI, London. [2] Bohannon, J. (2013) Who is afraid of peer view? Science 342, 60–65. [3] Binfield, P (2013) Open Access Megajournals – Have They Changed Everything? http://circleubc.ca/handle/2429/45605. [4] Kumar, A., Rajendran, V., Sethumadhavan, R. and Purohit, R. (2012) In silico prediction of a disease-associated STIL mutant and its affect on the recruitment of centromere protein J (CENPJ). FEBS Open Bio 2, 285–293. [5] Araki, H., Knapp, C., Tsai, P. and Print, C. (2012) GeneSetDB: a comprehensive meta-database, statistical and visualisation framework for gene set analysis. FEBS Open Bio 2, 76–82. [6] Acuña, L., Picariello, G., Sesma, F., Morero, R.D. and Bellomio, A. (2012) A new hybrid bacteriocin, Ent35–MccV, displays antimicrobial activity against pathogenic Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. FEBS Open Bio 2, 12–19. [7] Jensen, M.K., Lindemose, S., de Masi, F., Reimer, J.J., Nielsen, M., Perera, V., Workman, C.T., Turck, F., Grant, M.R., Mundy, J., Petersen, M. and Skriver, K. (2013) ATAF1 transcription factor directly regulates abscisic acid biosynthetic gene NCED3 in Arabidopsis thaliana. FEBS Open Bio 3, 321–327.
[8] Hammond, E., Handley, P., Dredge, K. and Bytheway, I. (2013) Mechanisms of heparanase inhibition by the heparan sulfate mimetic PG545 and three structural analogues. FEBS Open Bio 3, 346–351. [9] Moody, R.G. and Williamson, M.P. (2013) Structure and function of a bacterial Fasciclin I Domain Protein elucidates function of related cell adhesion proteins such as TGFBIp and periostin. FEBS Open Bio 3, 71–77. [10] Szeto, C.Y.-Y., Lin, C.H., Choi, S.C., Yip, T.T.C., Ngan, R.K.-C., Tsao, G.S.-W. and Lung, M.L. (2014) Integrated mRNA and microRNA transcriptome sequencing characterizes sequence variants and mRNA-microRNA regulatory network in nasopharyngeal carcinoma model systems. FEBS Open Bio 4, 128–140. [11] The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) http:// am.ascb.org/dora/.
Mary Purton is Executive Editor of FEBS Open Bio. She obtained her PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of Nottingham and has spent the last 30 years in science publishing, working on various journals, including Trends in Biochemical Sciences and Nature, and has also edited numerous books.
Mary Purton FEBS Open Bio Editorial Office, Cambridge, UK E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 29 November 2014
