Letter to the Editor [Essays]

Nick J. Proudfoot Department of Molecular Biology, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RE, United Kingdom Corresponding author: nicholas.proudfootpath.ox.ac.uk

I am writing this letter on the eve of Terri Grodzicker's stepping down as the long-standing Editor of Genes & Development. I wish to acknowledge and thank Terri for her many years of service to the scientific fields of development, molecular genetics, and, more broadly, molecular biology through her steady editorial guidance of this important journal. Indeed, it has always been my view that basic science journals should be there to nurture and encourage scientific endeavor and discovery, as has been G&D’s policy over numerous decades. Sadly, such journal behavior is not always evident, with many journals now controlled by publishing houses that often seem more interested in financial profit than scientific progress.

My experience of publishing research in molecular biology extends back almost 50 years. Scientific progress has always been measured by publication. Consequently, journals have traditionally played a critical role in determining whether a lab's funding is maintained and/or whether lab members attain the fellowships or scientific positions that they aspire to. When I started my own research career at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge UK in the 1970s, we had a very limited choice of journals in which to publish our research studies. Essentially, if the results appeared newsworthy, then we tried Nature, but otherwise the local Cambridge journal, Journal of Molecular Biology, was favored. I remember publishing the top parts of my doctoral thesis research in Nature but then a fuller account of my thesis (effectively the whole thesis) in JMB. As with the rapid rise in molecular biology technologies, such as gene cloning and PCR, so too the available molecular biology journals quickly expanded in number. In particular, a disaffected Nature Editor, Ben Lewin, founded his own journal, Cell. Through his “hands-on” approach in selecting and indeed …

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