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The Biophysical Journal is now published by Cell Press, so point your browsers (and change your RRS feeds) once you’re redirected to the new site automatically.
From the horse’s mouth:
Cell Press is proud to become responsible for publishing the Biophysical Journal with the first issue of 2009. To facilitate the transition from the journal’s previous web site, all content will be freely accessible for the first three months. Members of the Biophysical Society will receive an email in late March explaining how to set up their online access to the journal.
Emphasis mine. For the next three months, we can all enjoy free access to Biophysical Journal. Get reading!
Traditional lectures don't work Molecule of the Month: Tobacco Mosaic Virus
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Biophysj. I wonder if it will get a wider general biology readership since it is now linked to the Cell line of journals. One interesting thing to note is that the theory section seems to be much smaller than in previous issues. I wonder if this will be an ongoing trend or just a one-issue anomaly?
I hadn’t noticed, but you’re right, there are only a few theory papers this issue. I’m guessing that the editorial decisions haven’t changed yet, but I could imagine trying to slant the journal more towards biology to grow readership and the ever-important impact factor. That being said, there are a dearth of places to publish biophysics theory (BJ and PNAS are the big two, really), so I hope that isn’t in the cards.
Thinking more about the “theory” section, I think it would make sense to get rid of the it altogether and simply place theory papers in the appropriate categories that already exist. Why shouldn’t protein folding theory papers exist alongside protein folding experimental papers (or what have you)?
In BJ there has never been a true separating out of the theory papers into that specific section. A lot of times, molecular dynamics papers are published under the ‘proteins’ section.
One reason to have a separate theory section is for papers describing, for example, a new theoretical tool. It wouldn’t necessarily fit in any one category but could still be of interest to BJ readers.
I’m wondering about the formatting of the papers (out of curiosity) but more importantly the subscription cost. Will BJ suddenly get more expensive for libraries?
I have a theoretical Letter in press at BiophysJ, presumably for the Jan. 21 issue. The proofs were in the old format. I hope the new page limits for regular articles don’t lead to the GlamourMags trend of short papers with 50 supplemental figures. Reviewers will no doubt become total pains in the ass if they get to require supplemental materials 5x as long as the regular article. Also, if they go the GlamourMags route, I suspect that pure theory papers will become rarer.
Alex,
You might be right, but I hope that since it’s still a society journal they continue to serve the needs of the Biophysical Society and that means publishing theory papers as well as experimental papers. It will be interesting to see if the switch affects the editorial process.
With the 2nd issue of BJ published by Cell Press out today, it looks like the Theory and Modeling section is back to its normal size.
Not only that, there was even a paper I’ve been expecting for a while in said section!
I also have to say that I think BJ papers have an understated but also classy layout as-is. Kind of like the old PNAS, before they ruined it by putting the blue PNAS sidebars on every page. I hope Cell Press doesn’t modify anything.
That was a good issue. Aside from liking it because my own paper was in there (first time in BJ!), I liked the Theory and Modeling section for having two papers on blood vessel scaling relationships.