Aspirations for a new journal

Aspirations Wayne IColumbia

University

and Howard

for a new journal

A Hendrickson’ Hughes

Medical

Institute,

Structure

and Carl-bar

New York,

NY 10032,

15 September

Structural studies are increasingly important in biology. We introduced Structure to the scientific community earlier this year with a pre-launch issue commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of the structure of DNA. As we said at the time, we have been motivated to start Structure by the incredible recent successes of structural investigations on biological macromolecules and assemblages. Fueled by impressive advances in instrumentation, technical methodology and recombinant techniques for producing virtually any molecules of interest, we are witnessing a flood of new structures and of incisive follow-up studies to test the hypotheses they generate. We also sense a growing appreciation in the biological community of the importance of structural information in the analysis of biological problems. As the number of biologically exciting papers deserving rapid and prominent publication has already outstripped the capacity of the usual outlets, it seems the right time to start a new journal that serves the needs of both the biological and structural communities.

Current

Biology

USA and *ESRF, BP220, F-38043

Grenoble

Cedex,

France

1993

will also publish papers that elucidate underlying biophysical principles of substantial generality or that lead to the engineering of novel properties. In addition, it will publish brief reviews that highlight topics of especial interest to readers with a structural perspective on biology. Rapid processing and publication of papers will be essential features of the journal. All papers will be subject to an immediate editorial screening process and for those that meet the criteria detailed in our Instructions to Authors, we will make every effort to reach a decision, based on referees’ reports, within four weeks of submission. The text and figures of accepted papers will be handled in electronic format whenever possible, so that papers will appear in print one or two months after acceptance. Our expectations were high from the start, and we have been very pleased by the response to the initial call for papers for Structure. The papers published in this issue give some flavor of the variety of biological issues that structural information can now address. We look forward to publishinginany more papers of biological importance. We are grateful to the Editorial board for all their help and to the staff of Structure at Current Biology Ltd.; their performance in handling manuscripts in the startup phase is cause for pride. Both the London and the San Francisco offices of the journal are available to provide advice to anyone wishing to publish in it. We now aim to establish Structure as an indispensable component of biological science, and we welcome your contributions to, and comments on, this endeavor.

The hallmarks of papers in Structure will be their rapid publication, their high scientific standards and their biological relevance. Most of the papers in the journal will be full reports of new structures of biological macromolecules or assemblages at atomic resolution, as determined by X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy. A section of each paper entitled Biological implications will give special emphasis to a clear description of the biological significance of the results. Although the main focus will be on the description of structures as they relate to the biological action of particular macromolecules or assemblages, Structure

@

BrZndh*

Ltd

ISSN

0969-2126