Celebrating the 80th anniversary of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: a special issue.

Abstract

It is my great pleasure to introduce the Special Issue that we have compiled to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the journal Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and to look back over the journal’s more recent history, notably since the 50th Anniversary in 1984, when the origins of the journal and its historic link to the then Netherlands Society for Microbiology (since 2011, the Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging voor Microbiologie [Royal Netherlands Society for Microbiology]) were reviewed by the Professor Adriaan Fuchs, the Editor-in-Chief (Fuchs 1984). Since that time, the journal has had five Editor-in-Chief’s (Table 1) and has expanded its output from one volume each year to two volumes. Greater internationalisation of the journal’s profile is now apparent: whereas the first half century relied almost exclusively on Editors from the Netherlands (Fuchs 1984), the Editors and Editorial Board members are now distributed worldwide, although we are pleased to retain our link to the KNVM through the presence of its chair, Professor Han Wosten, as an Editor. In 1997, Professor Mike Goodfellow became the first Editor-in-Chief from outside the Netherlands and helped consolidate the journal’s longstanding relationship with the communities of scientists working on Actinobacteria and on microbial systematics. Appropriately, in this anniversary year, the journal has published a study by Prof Goodfellow and colleagues that proposes naming a novel streptomycete in recognition of van Leeuwenhoek (Busarakam et al. 2014). The journal has refined its Aims and Scope over the years, not least to embrace developments in molecular genetics and genomics, but has remained true to its roots as a journal of general microbiology. Notably, we continue to publish work on both bacteria and eukaryotic microorganisms, and now publish work on archaea. The journal has also kept up with developments in academic publishing enabled by the internet, moving to online submission in 2003 and now offers authors the option of paying for Open Access publication (Springer Open Choice); our Editors can also now ‘cascade’ manuscripts to the journal SpringerPlus (http://www.springerplus.com/). More recently we have moved into the realm of social media, with our Twitter feed (@SpringerMicBio). Looking to the future, it seems likely that social media will play an increasingly important role in disseminating and promoting news of interesting scientific reports. It is interesting to note that even in 1984, publication metrics such as Impact Factor were being debated (Fuchs 1984) and it is pleasing to report that our Impact Factor appears steady at just over 2 (2012 5 year Impact Factor, 2.04). In this regard, it is important to restate the significance of journals such as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, which provide a repository for the data I. C. Sutcliffe (&) Department of Applied Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, UK e-mail: iain.sutcliffe@northumbria.ac.uk