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Editorial |
IJSEM Editorial Office
Correspondence
Aidan Parte
(a.parte{at}sgm.ac.uk)
There have been some major changes for IJSEM, in the Editorial Board, policies, production, and print and online journals. I will outline them below.
New Editors
At the Paris IUMS Congresses, where IJSEM had its 2002 Editorial Board meeting, Erko Stackebrandt stood down from the Board of the journal after many years as Associate Editor then Editor. Erko has been a major influence on the journal and helped bring IJSB forward from its days with the American Society for Microbiology through to its relaunch as IJSEM and beyond with the Society for General Microbiology. The terms ‘international’, ‘systematic’, ‘evolutionary’ and ‘microbiology’ have been well covered by the last 3 years of IJSEM, and the journal has prospered extraordinarily well under Erko's leadership, owing to his devotion and vision towards essential developments in the field. He was replaced by Hans Trüper, who unfortunately was unable to remain as Editor owing to his commitments as President of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies. Hans will remain on the Board as our Latin and Greek expert and to cover matters relating to the Bacteriological Code and Judicial Commission. Peter Kämpfer of the University of Giessen, Germany, has now become Editor of the journal, and I look forward to developing the journal with him over the next few years.
Monique Gillis from Ghent, Belgium, retired after 7 years on the Board at the end of 2002; Monique will be greatly missed, but the Ghent group will continue its presence on the Board through her replacement, Peter Vandamme. John Bowman (Hobart, Tasmania), Jongsik Chun (Seoul, Republic of Korea) and Fred Rainey (Baton Rouge, LA, USA) have also joined the Board recently. Norbert Weiss has retired after many years of service to systematics as List Editor, and he has been replaced by Jean Euzéby (Toulouse, France), whose List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature (http://www.bacterio.cict.fr) is an invaluable resource for systematists.
I am also pleased to welcome Natalie Wilder to the editorial team of IJSEM and Journal of Medical Microbiology. Natalie joined us back in December and has recently submitted her PhD thesis on molecular virology to the University of London.
Online submission compulsory from 1 June
The ESPERE online submission and peer-review system has been running since June 2001, and now handles 75% of all submissions to the journal; papers submitted via ESPERE have a decision reached on average 4 weeks sooner than those submitted on paper. This PDF-based system has proved popular with the authors, Editors and reviewers (in conjunction with the online report form), and it was decided in Paris to make online submission compulsory from 1 June 2003. Of course, it will take some time for the new submission policy to become widely known by our author community, and we will still receive paper submissions after 1 June. However, authors will be allowed only one paper submission after this date, and subsequent paper submissions will be returned to the author for resubmission via ESPERE.
One objection to creating PDFs that we encounter is the cost of the software needed; there are many ways for generating PDFs, including online services, but the best is to use the full Adobe Acrobat product, which includes the Distiller program; Acrobat is available at a very reasonable cost (less than for sending a manuscript by courier) to those in educational institutions in many countries. The PDFs may also be used in our publish ahead-of-print system, Papers in Press, in which we have now published more than 250 papers.
Developments for IJSEM in print and online
All four SGM journals (Microbiology, Journal of General Virology, Journal of Medical Microbiology and IJSEM) have been redesigned from cover to cover under a new SGM journals' ‘look’, and they all now use the same stylistic conventions, such as name–year referencing and abbreviated journal titles. This should have great benefits for the production side of the operation, as those little differences can cause big problems. We have also changed our typesetters to The Charlesworth Group, after a long and fruitful partnership with Cambridge University Press. Along with faster print schedules, authors now receive their proofs via e-mail as PDF files, which is very beneficial with our truly international author community.
To coincide with the launch of the new look, IJSEM Online now has full-text HTML in addition to PDFs, and is now fully searchable with inter-article linking and links from accession numbers to the GenBank database; we have also introduced the sophisticated CiteTrack citation-tracking system and ‘Email a Friend’, and most-cited and most-read listings, which make interesting reading. There is also a link from the homepage of the journal to all the supplementary data that we have published.
Short format papers
In this issue, a paper by Kämpfer et al. (pp. 893–896) outlines a new shorter format for describing novel species of an existing genus. This paper stems from discussions at the previous two Editorial Board meetings, and is aimed at helping the Editors and referees assess the merits of a description by providing the data in a more standardized form, utilizing the supplementary data system in IJSEM Online wherever possible, and also the publishers by enabling us to publish more descriptions in the same number of pages. The idea is that only data essential to a description are printed in the journal, with a minimal introduction section (if any) and methodologies replaced by references; repetition of data between the text, description and tables must also be minimized. We hope that authors will use this shorter format, without too much persuasion, as it seems to be a natural follow-on from our successful policy of converting full papers to Note papers. From this issue onwards, Notes will no longer be identified as such in the journal; this should further encourage authors to format their papers in this way.
Certificates of deposition
It was decided in Paris to require authors to prove proof of deposition in culture collections; this follows on from the requirement for the deposition of all new type strains in public culture collections in two different countries, a policy designed to assure the availability of these important biological resources for future study and possible exploitation. This requirement seems to have taken some of the culture collections by surprise, but all that is required is written confirmation of receipt of a viable culture, its free availability to the public and an accession number.
ICSP website
Last year saw the launch of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes' website, http://www.the-icsp.org/ This is now being developed further by my colleague Robin Dunford, who has redesigned the site and added much new information on some of the subcommittees. We hope to make the site a focal point for subcommittee activities, with links to IJSEM Online and the List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature.
This article has been cited by other articles:
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  M. M. Floyd, J. Tang, M. Kane, and D. Emerson Captured Diversity in a Culture Collection: Case Study of the Geographic and Habitat Distributions of Environmental Isolates Held at the American Type Culture Collection Appl. Envir. Microbiol., June 1, 2005; 71(6): 2813 - 2823. [Full Text] [PDF]
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