Journal Announcements: June 23 2015
American Society for Microbiology to launch two new open-access journals, mSphere™ and mSystems™
ASM has officially announced plans to launch two new interdisciplinary open-access journals, mSphere™ and mSystems™, in early 2016. Both journals will provide streamlined decisions along with short publication times, to ensure important findings are available to the scientific community as quickly as possible. Formal Calls for Papers are scheduled for September 2015.
mSphere™ will be led by Founding Editor in Chief Michael Imperiale, who seeks to publish high-quality work that makes fundamental contributions to our understanding of the broad field of microbiology. mSphere™ will also welcome papers in emerging areas that do not fit within the current scopes of ASM's journals. The journal will undergo the same rigorous peer review process as ASM's 9 primary research journals, with decisions made by working scientists.
Dr. Michael Imperiale is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and a member of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. His laboratory studies the molecular biology of small DNA tumor viruses, including BK polyomavirus, which can cause severe and sometimes life-threatening illnesses in transplant patients. He has authored more than 135 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and served as an editor of ASM's Journal of Virology® and mBio® and associate editor of Virology and PLOS Pathogens.
Jack Gilbert will serve as the Founding Editor in Chief of mSystems™, a microbial systems journal that will capture work ranging from systems biology of individual microbes (consortia) to the systems analysis of microbial communities, including microbiome studies, microbial ecology, genomics, metagenomics, computational microbiology, and other work based on analysis of large data sets. The journal will welcome submissions from researchers who focus on the microbiome, genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, glycomics, bioinformatics, and computational microbiology.
Dr. Jack Gilbert is Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago; Microbial Ecologist and Group Leader at Argonne National Laboratory; Senior Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole; and Associate Director of the Institute of Genomic and Systems Biology. His research uses “omics” technologies to explore how microbial communities assemble themselves in natural and man-made environments. He currently manages the Earth Microbiome Project, an ongoing multidisciplinary effort to characterize the microbial diversity of our planet. Author of more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on microbial (meta)genomics and approaches to ecosystem ecology, Dr. Gilbert currently serves on the advisory board of the Genomic Standards Consortium, and, until July 1st, as section editor for PLOS ONE, and senior editor for the ISME Journal, and Environmental Microbiology.
All articles from mSphere™ and mSystems™ will be open-access: immediately and freely available to ensure wide dissemination of research without paywalls. In addition, Creative Commons licensing assures copyright will always remain with the author.
For more information on ASM's newest journals, please visit: http://msphere.asm.org/ and http://msystems.asm.org/.
Follow Drs. Imperiale and Gilbert as they tweet on behalf of ASM's two new journals: