PROTEOMICS: Into the next decade (2010)

With this issue, PROTEOMICS enters its eleventh year of publication. The level of interest in the application of proteomics in all areas of the Life Sciences is showing no signs of abating as is apparent from the large number of articles that have been submitted to the journal during 2010. Indeed, many more papers are submitted than we can possibly publish in PROTEOMICS, even with our scheduled 24 issues and generous annual page budget, necessitating rejection of more than 50% of the submitted papers. As ever, our main aim continues to be to maintain PROTEOMICS as the premier source for information on all aspects of proteomics. Over the last year, it has always been a pleasure to work with our four Associate Editors, Thierry Rabilloud (Grenoble, France), Scott Patterson (Thousand Oaks, CA, USA), Roz Banks (Leeds, UK) and Jennifer Van Eyk (Baltimore, MD, USA), together with Achim Kraus, Managing Editor of PROTEOMICS to help shape future development of the journal to ensure that it remains a leader in the field. As announced in my Editorial for issue 1 of Volume 10 of PROTEOMICS (January 2010), we are once again happy to consider papers in the area of Biomedicine, especially where these address issues of relevance to a broad readership. Nevertheless, our sister journal PROTEOMICS – Clinical Applications remains the preferred place for submission and publication of papers that clearly address issues of direct relevance to the clinical area. In this regard I am delighted to be able to inform you that at its most recent review meeting the National Library of Medicine (NLM) decided to index PROTEOMICS – Clinical Applications for inclusion in MEDLINE/PubMed. This is excellent news and should prove a major stimulus for the future development of PROTEOMICS – Clinical Applications, currently the only proteomics journal indexed in MEDLINE that specialises exclusively in the area of biomedical and clinical proteomics. On this occasion we have decided not to make extensive changes to either the Senior Editorial Board or the general Editorial Board of PROTEOMICS. However, two members of the Editorial Board have decided to retire due to changes in their personal circumstances. I would like to express my thanks to Michael Fountoulakis and Jean-Daniel Tissot for their service to the journal as members of the Editorial Board and for their reliable assistance in the peer review process. It is a pleasure to welcome Yogeshwer Shukla (Lucknow, India) as a new member of the Editorial Board, who is the Head of the Proteomics Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research. His major research interests are identification of protein biomarkers of toxicity and mapping the serum/plasma and other biological proteomes which are indicative of toxicity, which could help in understanding complex mechanistic pathways in disease such as cancer. Proteomics is a research area of increasing importance in the Indian subcontinent (see: Sirdeshmukh, R., HUPO Views: Proteomics in India: An overview. Mol. Cell. Proteomics 2008, 7, 1406–1407) and it will be very helpful to have the services of an Editorial Board member based in that region. I would now like to inform you about some new features and organisational changes that affect PROTEOMICS. As I am sure you will have noticed, PROTEOMICS is now hosted on the Wiley Online Library, which replaced Wiley Interscience during the course of 2010. Wiley Online Library hosts the world's broadest and deepest multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. It delivers seamless integrated access to over 4 million articles from 1500 journals, 9000 books, and hundreds of reference works, laboratory protocols and databases. It features a clean and simple user interface, and delivers intuitive navigation, enhanced discoverability, expanded functionalities and a range of personalisation and alerting options. The home page for PROTEOMICS can still be found at: http://www.proteomics-journal.com In January 2010, we published a revised set of Instructions to Authors for PROTEOMICS. The Instructions are now only published online, but the printed issues have a reference line to inform potential authors where the Instructions to Authors can be found. This makes it much easier to update the Instructions on a regular basis. The ongoing revision process is carried out in consultation with our Associate Editors and we hope that the Instructions to Authors will help authors in the preparation of articles and to meet the requirements for publication in the journal. The current version of the Instructions to Authors is in a HTML format with hyperlinks to different sections or other pages and can be seen at: http://forauthors.proteomics-journal.com Over the last year, there has been considerable discussion in the scientific press concerning the degree to which a considerable number of research articles in respected peer review journals contain substantial sections of text and other material that overlap with that published previously. At best this can be in the form of self-quotation from the author's previously published papers, but can also involve material from other authors' published work. Authors should be aware that we at PROTEOMICS take this issue of potential plagiarism very seriously. In order to address this problem, Wiley in collaboration with several other leading publishing houses has invested in “iThenticate,” a dedicated web-based content verification technology, which offers plagiarism detection through document-to-document comparison against a very large database of published documents. It is impractical for us to screen all articles submitted to PROTEOMICS with this software. Instead we are currently submitting all papers with a final recommendation of “Accept” to analysis with iThenticate prior to formal final acceptance. In cases where the software detects significant overlaps of text and/or data with that which has already been published in other research articles, the paper is either rejected in serious cases of plagiarism, or in less severe cases returned to the authors requesting that they modify or rephrase the relevant parts of the text to minimise the text overlaps and make sure that the relevant sources are cited in the text where appropriate. Only once such problems are resolved is the paper considered for final acceptance for publication in PROTEOMICS. Recently there has been a change in policy regarding charges for reproduction of colour figures. We continue to ask authors to contribute towards the extra costs incurred for the reproduction of colour in the print copy of their paper, but there is no charge for the use of colour figures in the online PDF version of the article. It is therefore possible for authors to choose to have black and white figures in the printed version of their article but to replace these with colour versions in the online PDF version. While the majority of the 24 issues of PROTEOMICS that will be published during 2011 will be regular issues, we will continue our policy of producing Special Issues devoted to collections of papers covering important and emerging areas of proteomics. In Volume 11 we will publish Special Issues on Quality Control in Proteomics (Editors: Lennart Martens, Juan Antonio Vizcaino, Roz Banks), Plant Proteomics (Editors: Dominique Job, Paul Haynes, and Michele Zivy), Microbial Proteomics (Editor: Michael Hecker), Stem Cell Proteomics (Editors: Hana Kovarova and Bernd Wollscheid), and Computational Proteomics in Biomedicine (Editor: FangXiang Wu). In addition, we will continue our tradition of having an annual issue devoted to reviews of hot topics in the field, to be published as issue 4 of Volume 11. We are already planning the Reviews issue of PROTEOMICS for Volume 12 (2012) – see the Call for Reviews published in this issue. The “goPROTEOMICS” portal, maintained by our Web Editor, Christine Mayer, continues to expand in scope and content. It enhances the PROTEOMICS journals with a variety of additional features. From the portal you can view the latest annual statistics for the most cited and accessed papers in the PROTEOMICS journals. In addition, the portal provides convenient access to our comprehensive online Meetings Diary, a list of the Special Issues and Review Articles published in both PROTEOMICS and PROTEOMICS – Clinical Applications, a collection of selected books on proteomics and of course essential information for authors and advertisers. The portal is also the place to continue discussion and debate concerning controversial topics in the field of proteomics that have been published in Viewpoint Articles in the journals. Finally, goPROTEOMICS hosts Virtual Issues of the journal, with an issue focussing on Proteomics in China (Edited by Fuchu He) currently in preparation. Finally, I would like to thank the Associate Editors, Senior Editors, Editors of Special Issues, the Editorial Board and the members of the editorial team, and in particular the Managing Editor, Achim Kraus, and his team in the Editorial Office for their efforts over the last year to maintain PROTEOMICS as the most comprehensive journal in the field. I hope that researchers will continue to choose PROTEOMICS as the journal in which to publish the results of their research. Finally, I would like to thank you, the readers, for your continued support of PROTEOMICS and hope that you will find much to stimulate and interest you in PROTEOMICS during 2011. Michael J. Dunn Editor-in-Chief