Casting a Wider Net

With this issue of Immunity, editorial responsibility for the journal has shifted once again. Immunity was nurtured through its early days by colleagues at Harvard and MIT and ably guided through its growth to the present day by others at Washington University and Yale. All of us owe a debt of gratitude to the previous editors for the outstanding job they did to ensure that the content of Immunity was of the highest quality and was drawn from the best the field had to offer. As a result of their efforts, we inherit a journal that is one of the premier venues for publication of immunological research. Our responsibility is to maintain these high standards while ensuring that the journal remains compatible with the changing landscape of immunological research and scientific publication.The contents of a journal such as Immunity reflect to some degree the taste and research interests of the Editors. Fortunately, prior editorial committees have shown excellent judgment and the journal has consistently published outstanding work in immunology, especially at the molecular level. We intend to maintain this tradition of excellence in the publication of molecular analyses of immunological phenomena while at the same time encouraging authors to submit their most creative and insightful work across the broadest possible range of topics. New approaches to the analysis of the human immune system, advances in the immunology of infectious and inflammatory diseases as well as cancer, and applications of mathematical modeling to immune analysis are just some examples of subdisciplines that we hope will be increasingly represented in the pages of Immunity.The decision about publication of a particular submission will be made as it has been for years, with reliance on reviews by referees well versed in the subject of a submission and careful consideration of these reports by the entire Editorial Board. A new feature of the journal will be electronic submission. The switch from hard copy submission and the elimination of the ensuing rounds of express package delivery will help speed up the review process and also allow more facile computer tracking of manuscripts and reviews. We also anticipate that the new system will permit referees to see the other reviews of a paper once their own comments are submitted. This exposure to the comments of others that have carefully considered the same manuscript should help raise the high level of reviewing for Immunity even further.Another area in which there will be changes is review articles. As immunology becomes more complex and fragmented into subdisciplines, the need for accessible reviews has grown. In recognition of the need for all of us to keep abreast of developments outside of our specific areas of expertise, many review journals have emerged recently to supplement the major publications on which we have all relied for many years. Cell Press believes that Immunity would serve its readers well by including more reviews in its pages, both brief commentaries (“Previews”) tied to primary papers appearing in the journal and full or mini-reviews on topics in which new paradigms have emerged or large amounts of new data have been published. Responsibility for the latter articles will be in the hands of a separate group of Reviews Editors, while the Previews will be commissioned by us based on papers accepted for publication. The Reviews Editors will also select reviewers and handle evaluation of all papers with an NIH author, to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.We thought long and hard about accepting the difficult and time consuming task of serving as the Editors of Immunity. In the end, it was clear to us that we owed a debt of gratitude to past editors and had a responsibility to the field that could be best recognized by taking on this responsibility. We also saw it as an exciting prospect that would expose us to a broad range of research in immunology, with the editorial board meetings becoming a welcome forum for scientific discussions with valued colleagues. These positive aspects of the work far outweighed the difficult task of getting permission from NIH to act in this capacity, permission that requires us to divorce our service for Immunity from our laboratory activities. One restriction imposed on us in this regard is that we cannot use U.S. Government facilities for our editorial responsibilities, which means that author contact with the Editors (which we hope will be necessary only rarely) must be via Cell Press and not our NIH phones or e mail. The details of this arrangement will be in the Instructions to Authors in the journal and on the Immunity web pages. We think this should be of little consequence in the broader scheme of things and look forward to providing the immunological community with editorial service that sustains the tradition of excellence that has characterized the previous boards of Immunity.