Evolution of a Biological Journal

It's been said, a myriad of times, that biology is difficult to understand without the context of evolution. So, I wonder whether there are corresponding insights for a journal focused on biology – ours here. Are our contents in sequential issues subject to “selection” with respect to “fitness” as they develop dynamically from year to year? When Integrative Biology began 5 years ago, it was centered on the idea of what innovative insights could be gained from the application of novel technological approaches to questions and problems in biological systems, and it has unquestionably prospered from that basis. While impact factors are subject to significant caveats for interpretation, the happy fact that ours is already above 4 is encouraging for the value that readers are finding in the contributions our authors are providing. A complementary happy fact is that the volume of manuscript submissions has continually increased, enabling us to publish a greater number of contributions while maintaining and even enhancing their quality. Indeed, during this past year Integrative Biology has added two new Associate Editors in order to help take care of the growing volume: Vassily Hatzimanikatis of ETH-Zurich and Paul Matsudaira of the National University of Singapore have increased our AE cohort by 50%, from 4 to 6. Their presence concomitantly indicates an expansion of our scope, as they hold scientific expertise in exciting and important areas at the interface of bioscience and bioengineering. Vassily is an expert in computational biology, with emphasis on molecular networks in cellular function and regulation; Paul is an authority in cell biophysics, including mechanobiology and imaging. Clearly these represent forefront technological approaches promising new insights when applied to interesting cellular phenomena and their associated challenges in understanding underlying molecular mechanisms, and we are eager to have Integrative Biology serve as a prominent home for work in these areas. At the same time, we have a changing-of-the-guard in an area that has been featured from the very birth of this journal: Shu Takayama of the University of Michigan is taking the place of Dave Beebe of the University of Wisconsin to continue our enthusiasm for micro/nano-device methods vigorously directed toward analysis of molecular and cellular properties and behavior – not merely new devices for their own sake, but dedicated to the advance of biological understanding. We are extremely grateful to Dave for his extraordinary success in bringing Integrative Biology to the attention of the best bioengineering researchers, and we are confident that Shu's presence will continue to do so.

Our evolution, then, has been both quantitative and qualitative. We are receiving more submissions and publishing more articles with the help of our expanded Associate Editor team, and we are broadening our intellectual scope to additionally feature computational biology, network biology, mechanobiology, and imaging. We remain, at least in my view, the strongest journal that consistently fuses technology with bioscience, and accordingly are on a road to becoming the premier inter-disciplinary bioscience/bioengineering journal. Where bioscience ends and bioengineering begins, or vice versa, should be difficult to ascertain in our pages. Perhaps Integrative Biology represents the emergence of a new species of inter-disciplinary researcher who first and foremost are passionate about the rich complexity of biological systems, and who simply seek the most powerful approaches to comprehending and manipulating – or even designing – them, regardless of which disciplinary background they may arise from. Our expectation is that this new species will flourish!

Douglas A. Lauffenburger

Chair, Integrative Biology Editorial Board

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