Frontiers in Life Science is ON

Frontiers in Life Science is the successor of HFSP Journal with a different publisher and new editorial team. It is therefore interesting to ask what has changed in this move apart from these organizational matters. To answer this, it is useful to go back and have a look at the Editorial of the first issue of HFSP Journal, written by then Editor-in-Chief, Arturo Falaschi.

This text starts with the question: Do we need a new journal focussing on the life sciences? Arturo Falaschi's response is a definite ‘yes’. He then goes on to develop his answer by giving ample evidence of what such a journal ought to be. A journal that “changes disciplinary borders into frontiers of progress”.

This is precisely the mission of Frontiers in Life Science: the new title makes it clear that we are interested in fostering research at the front line of understanding, at a place where new advances need new techniques, from physics, chemistry, bioinformatics or other disciplines. Our journal is, like its predecessor, meant to provide a forum for multi-disciplinary research that is about to leave its standard home base. All published papers will be made open access a year after publication and authors will also have the option to pay a charge to make their paper open access immediately upon publication.

Our notion is therefore not excellence per se, because this obviously means to compare one contribution with other, similar contributions. This, however, is often not possible at the frontier of research.

To illustrate this point: let us consider the circumstances behind the uncovering of DNA's structure, just to name the key biological insight of the last century. It was found by a physicist yet to receive his Ph.D. at the time, who knew his X-ray theory very well (certainly better than many others), and a post-doctoral zoologist, who chose not to continue with his post-doc project because he wanted to solve a fundamental problem. Admittedly, this was not a project of excellence at the time. But it marked the conquest of a significant frontier in the life sciences, if not the frontier of its time.

We therefore encourage authors to send us their papers that might not sit well in a more traditional, purely disciplinary journal. We will ensure that they get looked at by editors and reviewers that are competent in their disciplines but open to new approaches, new ways to look at problems, approaches that combine or develop methods not used before.

The editors of Frontiers in Life Science are very much in debt to the vision of Arturo Falaschi and his collaborators. We believe that their approach to the frontiers of the life sciences has just begun to deliver new and exciting results in many fields of biology, be it on the molecular, cellular, systemic, population or even evolutionary scale. Since its launch in 2007, nearly 300 journals cited HFSP Journal, these citations coming from authors in 43 countries. Eighty-six separate subject areas were represented in these citation statistics, reflecting the nature of the journal, in both its former and present incarnation and giving the truth to Falaschi's words that “The cross-fertilization of biology by chemistry, physical chemistry, physics, mathematics, informatics is no longer an option for the life scientist, but a must”. The journal's 2010 Impact Factor of 2.178* (ranking it 9/57 in Multidisciplinary Sciences) would seem to prove this statement. We will continue the mission of our predecessor journal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ralf Blossey

Editor-in-Chief