ome 50 people got together to celebrate the first anniversary of World Scientific’s journal, the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB), and its official launch on July 26. The red-letter day was, incidentally, a day before the birthdays of WS Chairman Professor K K Phua and JBCB’s managing editor Professor John Wooley.
In addition, the journal which was launched only last year was recently accepted for inclusion in Index Medicus and MEDLINE. Index Medicus and its online counterpart, MEDLINE, are used internationally to provide access to the world's biomedical journal literature. A journal is selected for indexing by the Director of the US National Library of Medicine, based on its scientific merit — the validity, importance and originality of its overall contents and its contribution to the coverage of the specific field.
Still, the team behind JBCB is not resting on its laurels. It will sustain its efforts to be a journal that is attractive and accessible to all who live on the frontier between computing and biology, beyond simply the bioinformatics community and include researchers extending from the quantitative science domain to that of experimental biology. To this end, prominent scientists at the interface of computing and biology have been recently invited to join JBCB’s advisory board. Among those who have accepted the invitation is Nobel Laureate Professor Sydney Brenner.
JBCB, which carries a strong international flavor in its papers (boasting contributions from North America, Asia-Oceania, Europe, and South America, among others), will also increase the number of issues published from four to six per year in 2005.