Another year for Science.

Abstract

T his is the one hundred twenty-second year of continuous publication for Science . The first issue—Volume I, Number 1—was published on 1 July 1880. Among its reports were a description of the U.S. Naval Observatory, way before it became the residence of the vice president; an account of the utility of electric power in rail transport; and “The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species,” by Thomas H. Huxley! You could, as they say, look it up. How? Any member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) can explore the Science archives, which hold each issue of Science published since that very first one, and download a PDF file of any paper. That is only one of the new things AAAS is doing for its members, and the start of a new year is a good time to list them. AAAS membership now also includes free, full access to Science Online, including Science Now, our daily news service. Members also have free access to Science Express, in which we publish timely papers weeks before they appear in print. We have added an already popular Membership Directory, accessible from Our family of electronic products continues to grow and now includes the knowledge environments STKE and SAGE, which offer up-to-date synthesis and summaries of research in the exciting fields of signal transduction and aging; our Functional Genomics site, covering this emerging field; and Next Wave, a Web site designed for young scientists. All papers appearing in STKE are now citable, available in PDF, and indexed in Medline. Finally, for authors we provide access to their papers in Science Online through referrer links: in effect, a free reprint service. AAAS is also under new leadership at the top: Dr. Alan Leshner, who led the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the new executive officer and publisher of Science . You will be hearing some of his goals and ideas soon in these pages. We have also made some important changes in our editorial team and expanded our news staff, which now has full-time reporters based in four countries and eight cities worldwide. Our Board of Reviewing Editors provides prompt, expert, and independent evaluations of the many papers we receive. To broaden our coverage and manage our increased submissions, we are actively expanding the board, eventually to nearly 100. Science has also expanded: We have added a new section called Brevia, appearing just before Research Articles. It will include one or more short papers of general interest; for a sample, browse this issue or those of 30 November and 21 December, and consult Instructions to Contributors for directions about submission. Several other aspects of our submission criteria deserve noting. We are setting out new guidelines for the placement of supporting material on the Web—most of our papers now contain such supporting data. We'll be inviting authors to place some material online, which will be reviewed as an integral part of the paper, even though it will not appear in the print version. We will also create opportunities for authors to deposit other related data (such as art, large tables, or movies) that cannot be expressed in a simple file; see our new expanded author help site at for this and much other useful information. A reminder: (i) copies of other papers that authors or coauthors have submitted elsewhere must be provided at the time of submission and revision; and (ii) it's our long-standing policy that contributors should declare any possible financial or other conflicts of interest to the editors. To facilitate this declaration, we now provide a convenient online form. Finally, there has been much recent discussion about the availability of the scientific literature. We made the decision last year, as a service to the scientific community, to release the full content of our Reports and Research Articles after 12 months on Science Online. HighWire Press, producer of Science Online and about 300 other journals, now has the world's largest archive of free, peer-reviewed, full-text biomedical articles—over 350,000 of them. This entire set can be browsed and searched by topical area, by keyword, or by using a new taxonomy we helped develop. You can also arrange to receive alerts and coach the search engine about your favorite journals. The new portal, the HighWire Library of Science and Medicine, comes to life on January 11; see it right now at . Click.