A niche for stem cell research

Developmental biology is currently at a turning point, with the more traditional approaches attracting fewer of the top scientists and becoming progressively less popular among students and funding agencies, while new emerging fields, such as stem cell biology, regenerative medicine and systems biology, are gaining popularity and importance. The stem cell field is growing at a steady pace and newcomers to this field are often unaware of the tight link between developmental biology and stem cell biology, which they consider to be an essentially distinct field. As a consequence, there was concern that the new generation of stem cell biologists might not relate to Development, because of the journal’s marginal investment in stem cell biology. Based on these considerations, when I joined the journal as Editor in Chief, I decided to try to push for the journal to become an important player in the stem cell field.First, in order to increase the visibility of the journal in the stem cell field, we recruited several new editors, including Gordon Keller, a well-known specialist in embryonic stem cell differentiation from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto, Canada. In addition, and to reinforce our expertise in neurobiology, we also recruited Magdalena Goetz, a renowned specialist in neural stem cells from the Helmholtz Zentrum Institute of Stem Cell Research in Munich, Germany. Together with Austin Smith and Shin-Ishi Nishikawa, they complete the list of expert editors handling most stem cell-based papers for the journal.Second, a new section of the journal entitled ‘Development and Stem Cells’ was launched in 2010 to increase the appeal of the journal to the stem cell field by providing a home for developmental biology papers dealing with stem cell biology. In 2010, a total of 74 articles (equating to ∼20% of all research articles), including the three most-cited Development articles for 2010, were published in the ‘Development and Stem Cells’ section. Eighteen of these are in the top 100 most-cited Development articles for 2010. In 2011, we published 85 ‘Development and Stem Cells’ articles, with many of these appearing in the top 20 most-read articles each month. Our stem cell editors have recently experienced an increase in the number of submissions in the field, indicating that these efforts are beginning to pay off. As we continue to strengthen this aspect of the journal, we also need to ensure that Development continues to publish a wide scope of excellent developmental biology papers.The major strength of Development with regard to its competitors is its status as a not-for-profit community journal that publishes articles of the highest scientific standards. Because it is run by scientists for the benefit of the scientific community, many authors consider Development as their journal. We have reinforced this community feeling through our new website called ‘the Node’ (thenode.biologists.com), which has started to increase the journal’s visibility among young scientists. This year we celebrated its first birthday and witnessed a steady increase in the number of posts on the site, which have also become increasingly diversified to cover subjects such as scientific news, research article commentaries, meeting reports and teaching materials.We have also been trying to encourage submissions in key strategic areas, such as modelling, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), stem cells, neurodevelopment, plant development and epigenetics. Throughout the year, and as part of the journal’s charitable activities, we have sponsored keynote/plenary speakers and sessions at meetings in these fields. The front section of the journal was also expanded to include new article types, including interviews with journal editors and community members. In addition, we published a number of Primer articles as part of the ‘Evolutionary crossroads in developmental biology’ series. This series features articles on organisms used to study evolutionary developmental biology, discussing their experimental tractability, impact, strengths and limitations. These articles, which are gathered together in a featured topic online at http://dev.biologists.org/site/topic/featuredtopic_evodevo_crossroads.xhtml, were commissioned with the assistance of the journal’s new evo-devo Editor, Nipam Patel, to increase the visibility of the journal to the evo-devo community and to encourage submissions in this field. We also launched a new section of the journal called ‘Technical Papers’, which houses articles in both short (Research report) or long (Research article) formats. These papers describe a novel technique, or the substantial advance of an existing technique, that has a significant impact on developmental biology research. For example, in this section we published an article describing the generation of transgenic fish ubiquitously expressing GFP and Cre-ERT2 (Mosimann et al., 2011), and an article presenting a novel landmark-free staging system for the developing limb bud (Boehm et al., 2011).Several important changes took place within the journal team in 2011. Sadly, Ben Scheres, who joined the journal 10 years ago and who was one of the major architects of Development’s success within the plant biology community, decided to step down. We were extremely fortunate and delighted, however, to be able to recruit Ottoline Leyser as our new plant editor. Ottoline is the new Associate Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, and she has been mostly interested in understanding the role of plant hormones, such as auxin, in plant developmental plasticity. Plant developmental biology is clearly an important and thriving area for Development; most plant papers are very well cited and, for example, 15 plant papers are in the top 100 most-cited papers of 2010. Our Executive Editor Jane Alfred also decided to leave the journal, to pursue another career opportunity at PLoS Biology. Jane worked for Development for the past 8 years and she played an essential role in shaping the current version of the journal. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for all her efforts and dedication to the journal during this time. We have been fortunate enough to recruit Katherine Brown as our new Executive Editor for the journal. Katherine, who was previously an editor for The EMBO Journal, started with us in November 2011. Finally, I am happy to announce that Steve Wilson was appointed as Deputy Editor for the journal. Steve has served as a journal editor for many years and has been warmly welcomed in to the deputy position.The journal continues to be excellently run from Cowley Road, Cambridge, and I’d like to thank the journal team for their hard work. I would also like to offer my thanks to The Company of Biologists supporting teams headed by Claire Moulton, Tom Galliers and Kay Richmond for their help and guidance. Special thanks, of course, are due to Seema Grewal, our Reviews Editor, and to Eva Amsen, our Online Editor and Community Manager for ‘the Node’. Finally, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the journal editors for their continuing hard work, support and feedback during the year, as well as to the Development Editorial Advisory Board for their ongoing support.

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