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A Message From the Editor

It is a great honor to have been appointed the 10th editor-in-chief of The Biological Bulletin. I am humbled to have been chosen to lead this important journal for the next five years and owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael J. Greenberg, the 9th editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, who served the journal well for 15 years and has been so kind and generous to me personally through the recent transition.

Mike has been a visionary editor-in-chief. A fine biologist and a skilled and thoughtful editor, he understands deeply the organic relationship between editorial work, peer review, and the impact a journal can have upon the world of science. During his tenure, Mike put together an outstanding and hard-working editorial board, to whom I am also most grateful. He also set a standard for editorial excellence and journal quality that the Board and I intend to sustain and nurture at The Biological Bulletin going forward.

Mike’s accomplishments while editor are many, but one that stands out among the rest is bringing the journal successfully into the electronic age in partnership with Stanford University’s HighWire Press (www.biolbull.org). This transition was achieved while maintaining extraordinarily high editorial standards and with resources that were quite limited relative to other scholarly publications facing similar challenges. Thanks to Mike’s leadership and an anonymous benefactor, issues of the journal dating back to Volume 1, Issue 1, will soon be made freely available online (in PDF format) as well.

So, thank you, Mike, on behalf of the Bulletin’s many readers, authors, editors, and staff, for your leadership, stewardship, helpful advice, and wonderful sense of humor. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors and look forward to working with you in your new role as a member of the editorial board.

As most readers know, the Bulletin was established in 1897; it is among the oldest peer-reviewed biological publications in the United States. Now in its 208th volume, the Bulletin is a valuable scientific resource and archive with a distinguished place in some of the most revered scientific libraries around the world.

The Bulletin is also among the most precious assets of its publisher, the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The MBL is America’s oldest private marine laboratory, an international gathering place for some 1400 of the world’s best and brightest biologists and advanced graduate students each summer, and home to a productive and renowned resident research program.

My own affiliation with the MBL goes back more than 25 years when, as a student, I spent a winter in the NIH’s Laboratory of Biophysics program, and later returned as a visiting investigator. Although it has been a while since I last worked at a bench in Woods Hole, I remember fondly the eagerness and excitement of the place, and the remarkable quality of science that was being done in the labs and courses there day after day by scientists from institutions across the globe.

From a personal perspective, taking a leadership role with the journal is enabling me to once again immerse myself in the dynamic international scientific community that is the MBL. As an institution, the Laboratory seeks to have a disproportionate impact on the biological sciences. It follows, then, that its flagship journal, The Biological Bulletin, should seek to do the same: articles published in The Biological Bulletin should be of concrete significance to the entire field of biology.

During my tenure as editor-in-chief, I plan to build upon my predecessors’ successes by exploring ways to further enhance this already significant journal. I will work to improve the journal’s impact factor by encouraging the top laboratories and scientists in the world—including members of the MBL Corporation, course faculty and alumni, resident researchers, and summer investigators and students—to publish some of their best work in the Bulletin. I will continue to build a quality editorial board. As an aside, I believe it is extraordinarily important to involve more MBL scientists in the editorial leadership of the journal. Their collective expertise is just too valuable a resource for the journal to ignore. Hence, as we build out the editorial board, we will welcome investigators who are actively connected with the scientific enterprise at MBL as well as continuing to nurture existing relationships. To counteract the perception that some have that the Bulletin is too provincial, I will also work very hard to foster the international nature of science at the journal by, among other strategies, actively recruiting manuscripts from top international labs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I plan to broaden the focus of the journal somewhat toward marine biomedical models, especially within the context of translational research. Although we’ll face significant competition from other journals, this move will increase our potential base of submissions and make the journal more attractive to prospective contributors, many of whom we believe already have some affection for or loyalty to the Bulletin and its publisher. I want to assure our loyal readers and authors that we will continue to accept high-quality manuscripts in our traditional areas of excellence: neurobiology, behavior, physiology, ecology, evolution, development and reproduction, cell biology, biomechanics, symbiosis, and systematics.

Ultimately, the Bulletin is looking for the opportunity to publish scientifically significant work. Such work tends to be, in general, transdisciplinary and, above all, presents a "full story." To use my own field of neurobiology as an example, the most powerful scientific stories deploy the tools of molecular biology to regulate brain-specific genes within specific cell populations, while using the sophisticated tools of electrophysiology and imaging to access the effects of the molecular manipulations. Often there is a computational modeling side to the hypothesis generation and an informatics side to the data itself.

I will be looking for science that is transdisciplinary because I believe such approaches can ask fundamentally more basic questions than investigations restricted to a single domain of marine biology. Five years from now, I hope The Biological Bulletin will be known as a journal for transdisciplinary marine biologists.

In today’s competitive world of specialty journals, tenure and promotions committees, and most recently, open access initiatives (which we endorse philosophically, but question financially), general journals like the Bulletin face many challenges. Ultimately, my tenure as editor-in-chief will be judged by the quality of the science that is published in The Biological Bulletin. I am confident that with the help and commitment of our superb editorial board, our loyal readers and authors, members of the MBL community at large, and our outstanding managing staff at the MBL, The Biological Bulletin will thrive. I look forward to the next five years.

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