Where Is the Good in Goodbye?
Authors: Malcolm K Brenner
Journal: Molecular Therapy (2014)

Although goodbyes are never easy, in parting with Molecular Therapy I would like to reflect on the good we have achieved together and to make sure that you, the readership of this journal, understand what we have been trying to achieve through the changes—some established, some still being implemented—we have made to the journal over the past five years. You can also let my successor know which of these changes have worked and which have been “epic failures.” When I became Editor-in-Chief, MT was already well established and a leader in the field. Nonetheless, there were major problems on the horizon. The publishing model for conventional subscription-based print journals was disrupted by the introduction of new online, open-access (author pays) journals that had minimal financial barriers to start-up. Moreover, as the field of gene and cell therapy became more successful, getting more mainstream attention and press, many high-impact articles were being diverted away from MT. How could we retain and even improve our position in this increasingly competitive environ­ment? One of this journal's most important advantages over the competition has been the value added by our professional full-time editor, a position established by Inder Verma when he first set up the journal. As Executive Editor, Rob Frederickson contributes and organizes significant amounts of front-end material that reviews and highlights both the journal's content and advances elsewhere in the literature. An additional advantage is that MT is a society-owned journal, and the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) has always been an unsurpassed resource for the highest-quality peer review. Rob and I therefore reorganized the editorial structure to appoint a series of deputy editors (DEs), each with responsibility for specific research areas in the field. The DEs organize manuscript peer review and final evaluation, and I hope that our contributors have felt that this level of expertise in the field of investigation has facilitated the decision process and minimized the “third-reviewer” phenomenon from which almost all of us have suffered at one time or another. As an added benefit, with the responsibility for organizing peer review and evaluation largely devolved to the DEs, Rob has had more time to increase the amount of front-end material. We saw the development of online journals as a threat to our established way of doing things, but it was also as an opportunity for us to grow. Although there are many advantages to being a society journal, there are also major responsibilities. MT has always prided itself on publishing work representative of the broad spectrum of research topics studied by the ASGCT's members. In the past, this editorial policy meant that MT published papers based on their quality and novelty within a subdiscipline, irrespective of its broad topical interest. As a consequence, Molecular Therapy has published articles that are influential in a subdiscipline even if their broader impact is more limited. As gene and cell therapy became more mainstream, our responsibility to the Society sometimes meant researchers in topics of greater current interest turned to higher-impact journals. We decided that we, too, should take advantage of the open-access online publishing model. We developed a series of journals in the Molecular Therapy family that publish high-quality work of more focused interest, enabling MT itself to focus on research papers that are of the broadest topical interest. Three journals have been started: Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids (John Rossi, Editor-in-Chief), followed by Molecular Therapy – Methods & Clinical Development (Matthew Porteus, Editor-in-Chief), and, most recently, Molecular Therapy – Oncolytics (Yuman Fong, Editor-in-Chief). These journals cover most of the Society members’ research disciplines, and each has a separate editorial board and direct submission portal. The danger of this approach, of course, is that the journals will simply cross-compete and cannibalize one another. We therefore ensured that all the journals in the MT family can benefit from the cross-referral of articles from one journal to another, if deemed appropriate by the editors or peer reviewers. Moreover, the websites of each journal will highlight and link to relevant papers in other family journals, and front-end commentaries and Research Highlights articles in MT itself will emphasize some of the most significant content in the other journals in the family. This will enable us to continue to offer high-quality peer review and publish scientifically sound work covering an array of topics, while allowing MT to focus on the strongest science in the most topical areas. All three open-access journals have now launched, and their success so far has exceeded our projections. Because the Web has been one of my main areas of focus, when I took this job I had hoped to harness the power of social media to further promote the journal. Although we have been able to introduce podcasts and video summaries into the MT website, we have not yet exploited the full opportunities available; this is one area in which my successor will undoubtedly do much better than I. I hope that the changes we introduced are appealing and will continue to provide clear benefits in the years to come, but none of these would have been possible without the continued help and support of Rob Frederickson; the Society's administrative leadership; and our publisher, Nature Publishing Group. Above all, however, the journal exists and succeeds only because of the contributions of our deputy and associate editors, our editorial board, our reviewers, our authors, and our readers. Thanks to all of you for everything you have done for MT over the past five years, and I have no doubt that our next Editor-in-Chief, Seppo Ylä-Herttuala, will find the position as gratifying as I did.