A history of EcoSal Plus

ABSTRACT

EcoSal Plus (ESP) is the authoritative online review journal that publishes an ever-growing body of expert reviews covering virtually all aspects of Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and other members of the order Enterobacterales and their use as model microbes for biological explorations. This review will cover the history of ESP, starting with its origins as multi-volume printed books entitled Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology that became “the Bible” for information on the physiology, metabolism, genetics, and other aspects of E. coli and Salmonella. After two printed editions, this resource moved online as EcoSal in an era when electronic publishing was still in its infancy. Progress in establishing EcoSal was slow due to technical issues of online publishing and difficulties in recruiting authors to produce new material. This venture was relaunched in 2013 as EcoSal Plus in a completely new web platform that was much more user (and author) friendly and with an expanded scope to include other members of the order Enterobacterales. EcoSal Plus will be ending as a standalone publication but will merge with Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews to continue providing high-quality, authoritative reviews on E. coli, Salmonella, and related organisms.

INTRODUCTION

EcoSal Plus (ESP) is a comprehensive resource that is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge on the physiology, genetics, and molecular biology of Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and other bacteria in the order Enterobacterales, along with their associated phage. It was originally presented as two printed editions, published in 1987 and 1996, entitled “Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium: Cellular and Molecular Biology” (1, 2) before a transition to an online resource in the 2000s. This chapter will provide a brief review of the sometimes-painful history of this project just before it undergoes another major transition.

FIRST EDITION

Escherichia coli has long been recognized as the “workhorse” species in studying prokaryotic molecular and cellular biology. However, until the 1980s, there was never a single, comprehensive treatment of the considerable, broad knowledge that had accumulated in molecular and cellular aspects of this species. It was difficult for investigators, let alone trainees, to envision the existing body of knowledge and know what new areas of investigation should be prioritized. A group of senior investigators in the field, led by Frederick C. Neidhardt, came together to remedy this deficit. A general outline for such a project was developed in 1983, and the Editorial Board, formed the following year, soon began to issue invitations to authors. Since there was so much parallel and complementary work with Salmonella species, the decision was made to include Salmonella typhimurium in the project.

The project was enthusiastically received by the community, and in 1987, ASM Press published Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium: Cellular and Molecular Biology (1) (Fig. 1). This opus was a two-volume set consisting of 104 chapters and 1,657 pages. The 131 authors were urged to “provide all the important maps, pathways, structures, numbers, and processes that exist scattered throughout dozens of primary research journals, review series and treatises.” As the six editors stated in the preface, “…the work was never seen solely as a “handbook” of data. We wanted an integrated collection of thoughtful, narrative reviews that would provide coherence and integration of information and would point out areas in which new information and understanding were needed.”

Fig 1.

Cover of “Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium: Cellular and Molecular Biology” (1987) (1).

The book was a major success for ASM Press, despite the narrow focus on two species. Not surprisingly, it was heavily used by researchers in the field, but it was also used in many graduate courses, despite not being written as a conventional textbook. The book received enthusiastic praise, both in published reviews and in a post-publication survey of researchers. This survey yielded useful criticisms and suggestions, as well as “an overwhelming call for production of a second edition to continue the task of summarizing the information amassed about Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium” (preface to 2nd edition) (2).

SECOND EDITION

The momentum of research in this field continued at a relentless pace after the publication of the 1st edition, and in 1993, the original six editors plus several new editors met to start planning a 2nd edition. Two different publication models were considered to provide updated information. The first model was to combine a set of supplementary chapters for topics not originally covered, along with updated versions of outdated chapters. The second model was to produce an entirely revised work that would stand on its own. The editors agreed that the second model was the better approach.

Published in 1996 with Fred Neidhardt as Editor in Chief (EIC) plus nine other senior editors, the 2nd edition was a massive undertaking with nearly double the number of pages and chapters. The 237 authors featured a truly international effort with more than a dozen countries represented outside the United States. The 2nd edition featured expanded coverage of several subjects (evolution, molecular genetics, population genetics, genome analysis, and physiology) and added three major new subjects: molecular pathogenesis, evolution, and genomic informatics. The 2nd edition also had a slightly different title: Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology. This change reflects the revision of Salmonella taxonomy whereby the various “species” of the genus Salmonella are in fact a single species with over 2,000 serovars, and the organism previously known as Salmonella typhimurium was designated as S. enterica serovar Typhimurium. To avoid taxonomic confusion, the title simply referred to the genus Salmonella.

The 2nd edition was as successful as the 1st edition, with the 3,008-page tome also becoming a bestselling ASM Press product. But the pace of new discoveries in the cellular and molecular biology of E. coli and Salmonella proceeded unabated. At the close of the preface to the 2nd edition, Neidhardt speculated that “perhaps this is both the second and last edition of this work in traditional format. The coming of electronic publications foreshadows the future. It is likely that subsequent editions will be heavily influenced on the one hand by the growth of databases and on the other by advances in electronic communication. The volume of information accumulated thus far on E. coli and its enteric cousins forms a critical mass that ensures the continuing healthy growth of this fundamental and exciting field. Future editions of this work, in whatever format, will be inevitable as well as intriguing.”

NEW VENTURES INTO ONLINE PUBLISHING: ECOSAL

The first two editions of “Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium: Cellular and Molecular Biology” were familiar territory for book publishers such as ASM Press. The basic technology and general approach of copy editing, typesetting, and producing printed books were long-standing, although greatly enhanced with the introduction of computers into publishing. These were enormous projects—each edition contained two volumes with impressive numbers of chapters (104 and 155 for the 1st and 2nd editions, respectively), authors (131 and 237), and printed pages (1,654 and 3,008)—that nevertheless utilized traditional technology. The transition to online publishing for this work was a bumpy road, with many of the technical issues faced by what ultimately became EcoSal Plus also being experienced by other publications and publishers.

In October 2000, Fred Neidhardt, the Editor in Chief for the first two printed editions, convened a meeting in Washington with attendees, including several of the editors of the previous printed editions and several additional experts in E. coli and Salmonella. They discussed an exciting new vision for an online version of the next edition of this work that would take full advantage of the internet and be free of the constraints of printed books. In this new vision, there would be no limits on length, figures, color, tables, etc. Videos and other multimedia content could also be readily included. Relevant databases, genome sequences, PubMed articles, and other information would be immediately accessed via hyperlinks. Without the need to “lump” various topics into chapters to maintain a manageable book size, topics could be infinitely “split” into smaller units to dive into as much detail as needed. Rather than 155 chapters in the 2nd edition, there could be 1,000 chapters! In traditional books, production needs to wait until every chapter has been submitted, and so the first chapters submitted might be outdated by the time the book appears. With the new web version, chapters, subsequently called modules, could be posted online as soon as they were reviewed and edited without having to wait for potentially tardy authors. Most attractively, modules could be easily updated to accommodate the latest advances in the field; there would be no need to wait for a new printed book.

Planning began in earnest in 2001 for this new venture that was named “EcoSal,” being short for “Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology.” Roy Curtiss III became chair of the EcoSal Executive Editorial Board (Editor in Chief), with Fred Neidhardt remaining as senior advisor. Roy served as Editor in Chief until the end of 2005, when Cathy Squires and Jim Kaper became Co-Editors-in-Chief. The organization that was developed included an Editor-in-Chief, Executive Editors, Section Editors, and module curators (authors). There would be 10 domains overseen by Executive Editors with domain titles such as “Historical Perspectives,” “Molecular Architecture and Composition of Cells,” “Metabolism and Metabolic Fluxes,” etc. The latter domain (Domain 3) would have sections such as “Energy generation/redox control” (section 3.2), “Solute and ion transport” (section 3.3), and “Biosynthesis” (section 3.6), and each section could have multiple modules. For example, under “Biosynthesis,” there would be subsections such as “Amino acids” (section 3.6.1), “Purines/pyrimidines” (section 3.6.2), etc. The specific details of each domain were left to the EIC, Executive Editors, Section Editors, and authors.

In-person meetings of the Executive Editorial Board to develop EcoSal continued to be held in Washington (usually at ASM Headquarters) and at the annual ASM meeting (now called ASM Microbe), with some editors joining by phone. (With the development of Skype and Zoom, video conferencing was eventually utilized for these meetings.) But the limitations of technology at the time were becoming evident. An email in 2002 from ASM Press to the Executive Editors for an upcoming EcoSal Editors meeting asked attendees to respond “if you will be traveling with a cell phone and wouldn’t mind using it” to connect with other editors during the meeting.

The limitations of technology were a defining feature of the early days of EcoSal. The phrase “bleeding edge of technology” could certainly apply here. EcoSal was the pioneering adventure in electronic publishing for ASM and the ambitions of the editors and publishers were perhaps overly optimistic for that time. There was a steep learning curve in terms of preparing submitted manuscripts for posting on the web. For example, generating hyperlinks for each of some 200 references in a module was a tremendous burden for the authors.

EcoSal went “live” with the first modules being posted on 27 February 2004. These three modules were all in the Evolution and Genomics Domain and were newly written chapters that consisted primarily of text with simple figures and tables. Significant difficulties were encountered with more complicated tables, a prime example being the updated version of “Modulation of chemical composition and other parameters of the cell at different exponential growth rates” by Bremer and Dennis (3). This chapter had very complicated tables with many Greek symbols, superscripts, subscripts, and other symbols. It was a highly cited article in the 2nd edition, where a single table might occupy an entire printed page. But it did not work well with the HTML format in the first web platform used in EcoSal, and there was not sufficient technical expertise at ASM Press to smoothly transition from the printed 2nd edition to the website. Consequently, for many years, the printed 1996 2nd edition chapter was usually cited rather than the updated EcoSal version for this very important information.

Many readers of the new EcoSal wanted to be able to print out a module so they could work with a hard copy. But this task proved to be nearly impossible with the early versions of EcoSal. Elaborate workarounds were tried over the years with variable success, but it took several years and the launch of a new web platform before a quick link to a printable PDF version was developed (see below). Another technical issue that became evident was that updating modules to accommodate the latest advances in the field was not nearly as easy to accomplish as was first envisioned. Posting an updated version of a module involved nearly as much editorial and technical effort as posting an entirely new chapter. With some domains of EcoSal, such as Historical Perspectives, the inability to easily make updates was not a problem since these modules were “static” reviews, such as Agnes Ullmann’s “Escherichia coli and French School of Molecular Biology” (4). But for domains that feature continuous advances in the field, such as “Pathogenesis,” this inflexibility meant that modules were at risk of quickly becoming outdated. (It should be noted that periodic updates to published and copyrighted articles remain an issue in journal publishing.) These technical issues cited above and delays in posting modules caused many qualified authors to either refuse to contribute or abandon their manuscripts before completion.

Besides the technical problems with the EcoSal platform, there were problems with getting authors to submit manuscripts in a timely fashion. The same “guilt trip” leverage that an editor could use on a tardy author for delaying the publication of an entire book could not be used with EcoSal, since it was a continuous submission process. Deadlines were set for the submission of manuscripts, and deadlines were missed. Thus, while new modules were continuously being posted, there remained major holes in the coverage of important topics into the late 2000s. An interim solution was developed whereby PDFs of chapters from the printed 2nd edition were posted on the EcoSal website and made available to EcoSal subscribers (Fig. 2). Many potential authors we approached wanted to have a solid product, like a printed book, for their work rather than a possibly ephemeral website. The authors of chapters in the first two editions received copies of the entire book. Contributors to EcoSal were given a complimentary 1-year subscription to EcoSal, but after that expired, they had nothing to show for their efforts unless they paid an annual subscription. There was considerable discussion among the editors and ASM Press about publishing each domain as a printed book. Such an outcome would have been counter to the whole premise of EcoSal, and printed versions of EcoSal were never seriously pursued.

Fig 2.

Screenshot of the EcoSal website from 2007.

Another disincentive for authors contributing to EcoSal was the fact that their articles were not citable in PubMed. While chapters in printed books at the time also suffered from this limitation, the inability for an author’s contribution to be readily discoverable in a PubMed search was a major problem in recruiting authors. (This issue took many years to resolve, as described below.) Other factors that contributed to the slow pace of new materials being added and new authors being recruited included the fact that grant funding for investigators working in the areas of basic metabolism and physiology was minimal compared to some other areas of research, and experts in these fields were spending their time writing and re-writing grant proposals rather than writing comprehensive reviews of a field for EcoSal. Another problem was the potential overlap between reviews on E. coli and Salmonella written for Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews or other ASM Press books, which reduced the pool of potential authors to write on the same or similar subjects for EcoSal.

A much larger discussion was raging in all of publishing during the 2000s: open access. Open access is an issue that all publications have struggled with, from ASM journals to the New York Times. A discussion of this issue is well beyond the scope of this review, but a few aspects that directly affected EcoSal will be noted. Although people were still willing to pay for a printed book, many believed that material posted on the web should be free and readily accessible. Many experts in E. coli and Salmonella held this belief and did not want to write chapters for EcoSal, whose content would be restricted to subscribers. And so, there were problems in recruiting authors to write reviews of topics that were missing in coverage. Publications that were well established often had significant problems with the issue of open access, but for a new publication that was seeking to establish itself, such as EcoSal, this issue proved nearly fatal.

The business model for EcoSal had been a tenuous one ever since the beginning. As a standalone subscription, ASM members paid $125 annually, and non-members paid $289.95 annually in 2004. Discounts were available to those who already had a subscription to any online ASM journal, and institutional subscriptions were available. The number of subscriptions was low at the beginning and slowly increased as the amount of content increased. For many years, the fees paid to the web host of EcoSal (Open Books Systems) represented the entire ASM Press budget for electronic publishing, and it was not possible for subscription fees to cover these costs. The ASM Journals Division was developing online journals in the early 2000s, but there was no cost sharing or economy of scale since the Journals used a different electronic publishing system and different web host than those used by ASM Press for EcoSal. At the time, ASM Press and the Journals Division functioned as two separate operations, and even when EcoSal eventually went to a journal format within ASM Press (see below), there was little interaction with the other journals for some time.

By 2009, more than 100 new articles of high quality were posted on the EcoSal website, but there was widespread dissatisfaction among the editors, authors, and readers. The unwieldy and not user-friendly web platform originally instituted was replaced by a new platform and host/vendor that was an improvement but still left much to be desired. There was still no extensive in-house electronic publishing expertise at ASM Press, and it took a long time (up to 10 months) to post some modules after the initial manuscript submission. Authors (all unpaid) were asked to do many tasks to get their manuscripts, figures, etc., into precise electronic shape before posting. The problems recited above, inability to print/save articles, inability to easily update chapters, no open access option, no listing on PubMed, etc., were still unsolved problems.

The Editors-in-Chief wrote to Tom Shenk, the head of ASM’s Publication Board, about the numerous problems and concerns with EcoSal and requested assistance in solving these problems. Outside consultants were engaged to review EcoSal as well as the broader future of electronic publications for ASM Press, and their recommendations were presented to the ASM Publication Board and to the Council Policy Committee, the governing body for ASM at that time. The consultants recommended that EcoSal should be “reinvented,” not based on 8-year-old plans but on new innovative thinking. They concluded that the new web platform was significantly better than the original platform in terms of costs and capabilities, but they recommended that a new, more robust web platform be implemented and that ASM Press should conduct end-user research and rigorous testing on EcoSal’s user interface, navigation, and features. Several additional specific recommendations were made, and the consultants’ report was presented to the EICs in early 2010.

REBIRTH/RELAUNCH

A new era for EcoSal began with the recruitment of Christine Charlip as the Director of ASM Press. Christine had been a scientist herself, having conducted graduate work in neurobiology, and had considerable experience in publishing books and journals for academic societies. Christine started in March 2011 with a goal to fix the problems with EcoSal rather than just focusing on subscription numbers. She consulted closely with Jim Kaper as EIC and other key Executive Editors such as Susan Lovett, Jim Slauch, and Peter Karp. (Cathy Squires retired as Co-EIC in early 2011, having served as Co-EIC with Jim Kaper since 2006.) Christine also consulted with her counterparts in other publishing firms, e.g., Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press, to learn how they addressed similar issues, and she worked closely with Carrie Harwood, the Chair of the ASM Publications Board.

The outcome of these discussions led to a number of important decisions and improvements:

• 1EcoSal would be relaunched on a new digital publication platform that would handle all of ASM publications—books, journals, newsletters, etc.—that would be called ASM Science. EcoSal would no longer have to “go it alone” on a web platform but would benefit from an ASM-wide digital publication platform. Additional staff with extensive experience and knowledge in digital publishing would be recruited to provide in-house expertise.
• 2Since its inception, EcoSal suffered compared to other scientific publishing ventures by being identified as neither a book nor a serial/journal. EcoSal did not have either an International Standard Book Number or an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). This lack of a clear-cut identity led to difficulties in discovering the material unless you were already a subscriber to EcoSal. ASM Press committed to developing a new serial presentation of EcoSal (with an ISSN) to increase the visibility of the content, improve functionalities, and provide a strong incentive for authors to contribute manuscripts.
• 3As noted above, a major problem with EcoSal was the fact that it was not listed on PubMed. Among other criteria, PubMed requires publishing new content on a regular basis, and all articles must have an open access summary (abstract). EcoSal was reorganized so that articles would appear in an online journal format, with a separate volume number for each year and one or two issues appearing each year. Each issue would have 12–20 articles. The existing 100+ articles already posted on the EcoSal website would be reformatted for the new digital platform, and abstracts would be written for each article, either by the author or by an editor, if the author was unavailable. These articles were then compiled into volumes/issues starting with Volume 1, no. 1, which was given an official publication date of December 2004. (Fig. 3) Volume 1, no. 1 included the oldest articles on this site that had been originally posted in 2004. Volume 2, dated December 2005, contained articles that had been posted online in 2005 and so on. These changes provided the groundwork for subsequent acceptance into PubMed.

Fig 3.

Cover of EcoSal Plus.

• 4A new Open Access option was made available to authors, where authors could pay a fee to allow open access to their article. If an author’s work on the article was supported by a NIH-funded grant, the article would be deposited in the open access archive PubMed Central within 6 months of publication.
• 5New features were added that made EcoSal more useful and user-friendly. Among these features was a one-click option to download the articles in a PDF to be saved and/or printed. (Such a feature is commonplace now, but it was a most welcome addition after years of frustrating attempts to print or save articles in a usable format.) Another feature added was hyperlinks to provide links to E. coli K12 genes on the EcoCyc database site.
• 6The scope of EcoSal was increased beyond E. coli and Salmonella to include other related enteric organisms such as Citrobacter and Proteus, thereby leading to the revised name of EcoSal Plus.

EcoSal Plus was relaunched in June 2013 on the new ASM Science platform. It had a completely new design for a “branded” look and feel (Fig. 4). Approximately 136 articles from the old EcoSal website were reformatted into the new platform, and authors of these chapters were given the opportunity to update their articles. A new marketing plan was developed to encourage institutional and individual subscriptions, and an outreach campaign was initiated at ASM Microbe and other meetings to encourage new authors to join this venture.

Fig 4.

An example of an EcoSal Plus article title page.

Acceptance into PubMed

A major milestone for ESP was the acceptance for indexing in Medline/PubMed, and we were formally notified by the National Library of Medicine of this acceptance on 29 June 2015. However, the Emerging Sources Citation Index (Web of Science) declined to index EcoSal Plus because of their requirement for a minimum of 20 articles published per year. This annual rate of new articles for EcoSal Plus as a standalone publication was never achieved on a consistent basis. (However, EcoSal Plus articles will be included in the Web of Science in the future; see below.)

Increasing the number of new articles became a high priority for Susan Lovett when she became EIC in 2016. (Other priorities included increasing the diversity of the editorial board and setting term limits for editors to expand the perspectives of the publication.) A goal of 20 articles published per year was set, and additional editors and authors were invited to participate to generate more manuscripts. A new source of potential articles emerged with the decision to allow chapters previously published in ASM Press books to be “recycled” as modules in EcoSal if there were no plans for new editions of those books to be published. One example of this is “A brief history of plasmids” by Helinski (5), which was originally published in the book Plasmid Biology, published by ASM Press in 2004 (6). These chapters were updated as needed to post on EcoSal Plus, and a footnote was added to note the original source. On one occasion, the recycling of a printed book chapter occurred with the cooperation of a non-ASM Press publisher. For our Historical Perspectives domain, we had long wanted to include a module about Theodor Escherich, who first discovered the bacterium eventually named after him. Finding an author to conduct the necessary historical research on Escherich and write a manuscript was proving problematic. However, there already existed an extensive review entitled “Escherich and Escherichia” written by Herbert C. Friedman as a sole chapter in Advances in Applied Microbiology (Volume 60, 2006, Pages 133–196, Elsevier) (7). This valuable resource had been infrequently cited, and Elsevier generously allowed us to reprint this article in its entirety in EcoSal Plus. Dr. Friedman died just as the article was being prepared for EcoSal Plus (8), but he knew before passing that his work would live on in a much higher-profile publication.

Inclusion in the ASM Online Journals Package

Since the beginning of EcoSal, access to the material was only available through the purchase of an individual or institutional subscription to EcoSal. Many potential subscribers were reluctant to pay a subscription fee if the amount of available content was low, while many authors were reluctant to provide new content if there were few readers. A major breakthrough in 2016 was the decision to include EcoSal Plus in the ASM Inclusive Online Journals Package, immensely increasing the number of readers worldwide.

In 2017, a strategic business review was conducted with the goal of achieving a balanced budget for the ASM Press as a whole. This led to the recommendation to form a copublishing relationship with a large commercial academic publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to continue the publication and distribution of textbooks and other profitable products. The two ASM Press review journals, EcoSal Plus and Microbiology Spectrum, were not included in this partnership, and so preparations were initiated to transfer these publications to the ASM Journals Department. The move of EcoSal Plus to Journals was completed in 2020. While the readers of EcoSal Plus should not have noticed a difference, the transfer did require some coordination behind the scenes as new editors and production personnel assumed control over EcoSal Plus.

Further expansion

Over the years, ESP has continued to adapt to incorporate new information and new features. Since its origin, there were 10 domains that encompassed the various articles. In 2018–2020, two new domains were established to address the need for a comprehensive and flexible archive for these topics: Antibiotic Mechanisms and Resistance (Domain 11) and Bacteriophage (Domain 12) (Table 1).

TABLE 1.

EcoSal Plus domains

Domain no. (section)	Domain title
1	Historical Perspectives
2	Cell Architecture and Growth
3	Metabolism
4	Synthesis and Processing of Macromolecules
5	Responding to the Environment
6	Evolution and Genomics
7	Genetics and Genetic Tools
8	Pathogenesis
9	Life in Communities and the Environment
10	Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
11	Antibiotic Mechanisms and Resistance
12	Bacteriophage

THE FUTURE OF ECOSAL PLUS

The era of EcoSal Plus as a stand-alone publication will end in January 2026 when it will merge with ASM’s broad-scope review journal, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews (MMBR), which will feature an ongoing EcoSal Plus article collection dedicated to this content. EcoSal Plus Editors are joining the MMBR board to continue the journal’s work as the authority in this foundational field. The articles in EcoSal Plus will benefit from the impact metrics and reputation of MMBR and will solve any potential problems with overlapping topics. There will still be designated EcoSal Plus editors and new EcoSal Plus articles, and this merger will allow the focus and breadth of EcoSal Plus to continue unchanged. Like its print edition and standalone web-based predecessors, EcoSal Plus will continue to be the comprehensive, coherent archive of the entire corpus of knowledge on the enteric bacterial cell.

Biography

James B. Kaper is the James and Carolyn Frenkil Distinguished Dean’s Professor and Chair of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD in microbial ecology under the supervision of Dr. Rita Colwell at the University of Maryland College Park and his postdoctoral training in molecular pathogenesis with Dr. Stanley Falkow at the University of Washington. He has published over 300 journal articles, 70 book chapters, and other publications and edited six books, largely in the areas of E. coli pathogenesis and V. cholerae vaccine development. He has trained over 60 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows and received the ASM-DC White Award for Interdisciplinary Research and Mentoring in Microbiology in 2019. He was an editor of EcoSal and EcoSal Plus from 2002 to 2023, serving as Co-Editor in Chief from 2006 to 2011 and Editor in Chief from 2011 to 2016.