Dear Colleagues
As trained observers, especially those trained in the comparative approach, many of our readers will notice a change in the cover of this issue. The December issue has a sailing vessel in the lower right corner, the logo of Churchill Livingstone Publishers. This issue has in its place the logo of the Cell Stress Society International, the new owner and publisher of Cell Stress & Chaperones beginning with the January 2000 issue. How did this change occur and what does it mean for the future of our journal?
Our journal was launched about four years ago by Churchill Livingstone and was developed, initially under the guidance of Gillian Griffith, into a fully indexed quarterly publication that ranks in the top third of the very competitive cell biology category of the Institute for Scientific Information ratings. Our managing editor for most of this time was Andy Hyde. Midsummer of 1999, I received notification from Andy that Churchill Livingstone had decided to terminate publication of our journal after the December issue for financial reasons. Whereas the timing of this decision was a surprise, the decision itself was not. The journal had not grown as quickly as projected and the overhead cost associated with a commercial publishing house contributed to the unprofitability of the journal.
Scientific societies are often able to publish journals that cannot be sustained by commercial publishers because societies have a lower overhead and place less emphasis on profit. However, for most of the life of Cell Stress & Chaperones, there has not been a scientific society to either represent the field or support the journal. This situation began to change in the fall of 1997. Grassroots discussions about the need for an international organization to represent the field arose spontaneously at two international scientific meetings, one in India and one in Australia. By the Cold Spring Harbor meeting in May of 1998, sufficient structure was in place to hold an informational meeting to assess the depth of support for starting a society. The support was evident and Péter Csermely and I went forward as Acting Secretary/Treasurer and Acting President to formally organize the Cell Stress Society International. We decided early on that the society should be established properly as a legal nonprofit entity and I took the necessary steps to accomplish this, incorporating the society in the state of Connecticut. Incidentally incorporation positioned the society to own and publish our journal if the opportunity arose.
With this background, we return to the summer of 1999. After receiving notice from the publisher, I asked the society Council (Péter Csermely, Barbara Polla, Robert Tanguay and Takashi Yura) for support in requesting from Churchill Livingstone a transfer of ownership of the journal to the Cell Stress Society International. With a unanimous vote of support from the Council, I approached Andy Hyde with our request. After some negotiation the publisher agreed to transfer ownership to the Cell Stress Society International. After the decision was made, our colleagues at Churchill, Andy Hyde and Peter Shepherd in particular, worked with Helen Neumann and me to effect a nearly seamless transfer of the journal to the society. I owe special thanks to my frequent source of wise counsel on journal matters, Dr. Barry Hall, former Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Barry suggested that I contact the Molecular Biology and Evolution Society's publishing partner Allen Press, Inc, a full service printer and publisher with many years of experience in working with scientific societies. Our new colleagues at Allen Press have been very helpful in the transition to a society owned and published Cell Stress & Chaperones. We would like to thank in particular Dr. Robert Kidd, Director of Development, and Jennifer Hixson, our customer service representative, for their advice, patience and understanding during this very busy transition phase. This issue is the result of our combined efforts, and now it must be left to you the reader to decide how well we have accomplished the job.
So, now we begin a new and exciting phase for our field of stress response research. We have our own society and our own journal. Along with ownership come the responsibilities of not only maintaining the scholarly standards of the journal but also assuring its financial success. But now, any profits realized from the journal will be returned to the society for use in developing our field, i.e. Cell Stress & Chaperones is a journal published by scientists for the benefit of science. We will need your continued support as contributors and reviewers as well as subscribers to continue our journal's development. There will be further changes as we move through this transition. Under the cover title, notice the subtitle “A Comprehensive Journal of Stress Response Biology”, signaling our commitment to substantially broaden the journal's coverage. The December issue will be the last to go into the Ideal electronic journal database. We are already making plans for new electronic venues for Cell Stress & Chaperones, and we are currently considering both the new BioOne database (www.BioOne.org) and PubMedCentral (www.nih.gov/welcome/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.html). As these plans develop, you can stay informed of both society and journal events by visiting our combined website which has a new URL: www.cellstress.uconn.edu.