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