Current Biology at 20

Abstract

I can't recall if it was the morning or the afternoon of my first day in my new job that my boss said he thought it would be a good idea to start a journal to rival Nature, albeit only on the biology side. After pausing to gulp, I said “Yes, but….”.My boss was entrepreneurial publisher Vitek Tracz. My job was that of Managing Director of Current Biology Ltd., a newly formed company that had two Current Opinion titles as its starting point. I had taken the job after 16 years at Nature so, naturally, Vitek felt I should be able easily to start a rival.After a little, or perhaps a lot, of discussion about the problems of starting from scratch a high-profile journal containing all the elements of Nature, we settled on a rather less ambitious starting point. This was to publish mini-reviews with the aim of bettering the most-read section of Nature — its News and Views. We decided to start by publishing them every other month during 1991 and giving the journal away free to every subscriber to a Current Opinion journal as well as to several thousand high-ranking biologists. This would build up visibility and, we hoped, popularity so that we could then start to sell subscriptions, increase the frequency and, at some stage, perhaps, start publishing research papers.We kicked around many ideas for a title but in the end couldn't come up with anything that seemed more to the point than “Current Biology”. For the mini-reviews we came up with “Dispatches”. And for the journal as a whole we coined the slogan “Dispatches from the frontlines of Biology”. Twenty-four dispatches were to be commissioned for each issue, with four coming from each of the six areas of biology that had been defined by the Current Opinion series. They were to be heavily edited and illustrated in innovative ways and in colour. I commissioned the content. To help me edit it, I hired Kate Hooper, an editor from Nature. Celia Welcomme, who had brilliantly illustrated the then best-selling immunology text book (‘Roitt’) created the style of illustration. Vitek, himself, provided the creative input for the design of each cover.Current Biology kicked off in February 1991 and by the end of the year it was clear that we had a success on our hands and several thousand subscribers. This led us to turn it into a monthly subscription journal, at which point I decided I needed a Deputy Editor, a role filled by the current Editor, Geoffrey North, in May 1992. By then, the shall we? / shan't we? discussions had been resolved — we would start publishing research papers from the start of 1993.Peter NewmarkFounding Editor