The Society for Microbial Ecology's (SOMED) 36th International Conference is now history. As stated by President Andy Onderdonk in the last SOMED newsletter, the meeting was a success. The Organizing Committee, headed by Professor Alojz Bomba, had done a marvellous job. The programme was well balanced with a many good lectures highly relevant for our society. We would, however, have liked to see even more participants and/or SOMED members, something that was discussed at the General Assembly meeting. The discussion resulted in a proposal from one of our councillors, Sandrine Claus, who a few days after the meeting came up with an excellent proposal:
If they have not started already, I am quite sure that the SOMED Board will work hard to substantiate the excellent ideas that are outlined in Sandrine Claus’ proposal. I look forward to reading the winner's manuscript!
At the recent SOMED meeting in Kosice, Senior Publisher Anne Bindslev from Co-Action Publishing presented interesting information about MEHD and how the journal is developing. As the journal is now indexed in PubMed Central/PubMed, she encouraged all members of SOMED to support their society's own journal by submitting their best work to it, and also to have abstracts and/or proceedings from SOMED meetings published in MEHD.
At the meeting, four new members for the Editorial Board were recruited:N.V. Boyko, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine. Her last article in Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture clearly demonstrates that some plant extracts can modulate platelet functions in humans.
S.P. Claus, University of Reading, UK. In Cell Host Microbe, she recently had an exciting article entitled “Fighting undernutrition: don't forget the bugs”!
R.N. Fichorova, Harvard Medical School, USA. Readers of Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease will already be familiar with her article in the 2013 volume: “Effect of feminine hygiene products on the vaginal mucosa.”
K. Venema, TNO, Netherlands. His recent article in Best Practice & Research in Clinical Gastroenterology, entitled “Experimental models of the gut microbiome,” is a “must” for young scientists entering that field.
These four names will now be added to the current editorial board: J. Artega, Columbia; A. Berstad, Norway; E. Bezirtzuglou, Greece; P. Carter, USA; P. Conway, Australia; M. Fons, France; W. Garrett, USA; E. Houpt, USA; K.A. Krogfelt, Denmark; V. Lazar, Romania; P. Mastrantoni, Italy; M. Mikelsaar, Estonia; I. Rowland, UK; and B. Shenderov, Russia.
Thus, the journal now has “ambassadors” all over the world, and in addition, they represent all the fields that are covered by MEHD. Several board members took up the challenge given in my Editorial from November 2012 and submitted excellent manuscripts for publication in MEHD. With the strengthened editorial board and an increasing number of readers around the world, in addition to PubMed indexing, I am confident that an increasing number of articles will be submitted to the journal from now on.
With a slight travesty of a statement given in the Editorial mentioned above, I will end by underlining:
Only together can we make 2014 the best year ever for SOMED and MEHD!
Editor-in-Chief