Springer, one of the world’s leading science, technology and medicine (STM) publishers, will launch a new quarterly journal in 2007 called Systems and Synthetic Biology (SSB). The addition of this journal to the publishing program will strengthen Springer’s growing biomedical sciences portfolio.
Systems and Synthetic Biology will publish contributions that either advance the field of synthetic biology as an engineering discipline or use it to improve the scientific knowledge of existing phenomena. Original papers, reviews, methodology articles, software articles and commentaries will provide a platform for the exchange and dissemination of knowledge in this emerging field. A special feature of the journal will be the online publication of supplementary material such as three-dimensional figures, sequence data and alignments, animations and short videos. The Editors-in-Chief Dr. Pawan K. Dhar of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Kanagawa, Japan and Professor Ron Weiss of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA will be supported by an international editorial board.
Ron Weiss, commenting on this field, said, "The shared goals of systems biology and synthetic biology are to gain a fundamental understanding of cellular processes and create new cell circuits using a combination of experimental, theoretical and computational approaches.” Citing the new journal, Pawan K. Dhar continued, “SSB will provide a unique home for experimental systems and synthetic biology and offer adequate coverage for theoretical work."
Peter Butler, Editorial Director for Life Sciences at Springer, said, “We are very pleased, not only to strengthen our existing portfolio of journals, but also proud to offer the research community, from a diverse range of disciplines, a forum to publish their research results in systems and synthetic biology.”
Springer will publish Systems and Synthetic Biology in both electronic and print formats to serve the needs of librarians and readers around the world. All articles will be published online via Online First™, a feature that allows authors to bring their work to the attention of their peers at a very early stage of the publication process. In addition, all potential SSB authors have the option, via the Springer Open Choice program, of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model once they have been accepted for publication.
Springer is the second-largest publisher worldwide in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector. Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media, one of the world’s leading suppliers of scientific and specialist literature. The group owns 70 publishing houses, together publishing a total of 1,450 journals and more than 5,000 new books a year. The group operates in over 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and has some 5,000 employees. In 2005, it generated annual sales of around EUR 838 million.