The Scientist is undergoing a major transformation. With the January 7, 2002 issue, The Scientist will unveil its completely redesigned print format. The current circulation of The Scientist (50,000 copies in the U.S.) will be immediately expanded with an additional 25,000 in Europe and Canada – making it one of the most widely distributed life science magazines in the world.
The Scientist’s readers are being profoundly affected by changes in Internet technology. These changes affect scientific research, patterns of information exchange, employment opportunities, and collaboration options. As a result of the partnership, all of these issues will now be covered in further depth in The Scientist.
The Scientist will therefore become an even more important information resource for researchers in the life sciences, and a vital platform for advertisers.
The editorial team of The Scientist will collaborate with editorial groups working within BioMed Central, including the team creating the new and innovative publication – Faculty of 1000 – an online service highlighting the most interesting papers published in the life sciences, based on recommendations from over 1000 leading life scientists.
Dr. Eugene Garfield, President and Editor in Chief of The Scientist, states:
"Faculty of 1000 will contribute expert opinion to The Scientist through critical assessment of scientific literature. Combined with its many other established editorial features, such as Hot Papers and research news this original content makes The Scientist a must-read."
Vitek Tracz, Chairman of the Current Science Group, said:
"We are very excited by the opportunities offered by this partnership. The Scientist is already one of the widest read magazines among life science researchers, and the changing environment they work in deserves a magazine that reflects their unique needs and interests. I predict that we will delight our readers with the quality and extent of the planned changes."
ABOUT THE SCIENTIST
The Scientist was founded in 1986. It is distributed in print and electronically. It was the first continuously published science publication on the Internet and maintains a full text searchable web archive. Its content is distributed electronically to over 200,000 readers monthly. The print version is distributed in the United States to over 50,000 life science researchers. For more information about The Scientist, visit: www.the-scientist.com
WHO WE ARE
A Board of Directors consisting of two members from each partnering company will manage The Scientist LLC. Vitek Tracz, Chairman and Jan Velterop, Publisher will represent The Current Science Group. Dr. Eugene Garfield, President and Editor in Chief, and Dr. Alexander Grimwade, Publisher will represent The Scientist, Inc.
The Scientist, Inc. - President and Editor in Chief Dr. Eugene Garfield
Eugene Garfield is one of the key figures in modern science publishing and a pioneer of many innovations in information search and retrieval including Current Contents, a series of current awareness publications in print and online that reproduce and index the contents pages of research journals. In the 1950s he founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and later launched the Science Citation Index, an innovative index to the literature, and developed a wide range of successful information retrieval products now used by librarians, scientists, and scholars worldwide. He grew ISI into a large and successful business which he sold in 1989. In addition to his scientific and business achievements, he is the author of over 1500 publications. His dedication to the web is reflected in his web site at www.eugenegarfield.org where the full text of his books and papers is freely available. He has received numerous honorary degrees both in the USA and abroad, and is the winner of many awards including the Franklin Institute Wetherill Medal and the John Scott Medal of the City of Philadelphia.
The Scientist, Inc. - Publisher Dr. Alexander Grimwade
Sandy Grimwade has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Edinburgh, and has spent 30 years in various areas of science and medical publishing. He worked at Elsevier in Amsterdam, and was Biology Editor for Nature in Washington D.C. As the first Publisher of the Trends journals in Cambridge, England, he was instrumental in the early development of this popular series. Returning to the US, he worked at the Institute for Scientific Information on the development of several publishing projects, and most recently founded and directed a successful medical education software company. He joined The Scientist as Publisher in 1998.
Current Science Group - Chairman Vitek Tracz
Vitek Tracz, Chairman of the Current Science Group, of which BioMed Central is a member company, studied Mathematics in Warsaw and Jerusalem, and cinema at the Slade School of Art in London. After a 3-year fellowship in the History of Art Department of the University of Essex, UK, Vitek directed many documentaries and founded MediCine, a production company making medical films. He directed a feature film in Israel and then left film making to start a medical book publishing company, Gower Medical Publishing. The establishment of Current Science Ltd, which published periodicals in medicine, followed the sale of Gower Medical Publishing. Current Science developed the Current Opinion series of journals in many areas of clinical medicine, as well as some important primary medical journals including AIDS, Journal of Hypertension and others. At the same time, other publishing companies were started including Current Medicine, Current Drugs (publisher of the Investigational Drugs Database), Science Press and others. The sale of the medical journals was followed by the development of Current Biology Ltd, which published Current Opinion journals in various disciplines of biology as well as the journals Current Biology, Structure, and one of the first communities on the web, BioMedNet. The sale of Current Biology and BioMedNet has now been followed by the development of a number of new publishing ventures, including Praxis Press (developers of a major clinical medicine web service), Current Science (publishers of medical research and review journals), New Science Press [publishers of a new generation of books and journals (Genome Biology being the first), as well as teaching materials in the biological sciences on the web and in print], and finally BioMed Central.
Current Science Group - Publisher Jan Velterop
Jan has a wealth of experience within scientific journal publishing. Throughout the 1990s, he was the Managing Director of Academic Press Limited, where he was responsible for taking forward the highly successful and innovative IDEAL project, one of the first e-journal initiatives, which now provides thousands of libraries with access to the content of Academic Press journals. He has also held high-profile positions at Macmillan Publishers, where he was the Publishing Director of Nature Publishing Group and President of Nature Inc, and at the Dutch Media Group, Wegener, where he was the Managing Director of one of their newspaper titles.