Immunome Research-Five Years On

Abstract

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky Immunome Research came to life in 2005 [1] as an open access, peer-reviewed, online jour-nal to provide a focal point for the nascent field of „immunomics‟, a field bringing to-gether traditional wet-lab immunology re-search approaches with the new sciences of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics as well as mathematical modeling [2,3]. Immu-nome Research provides coverage of all topics within the field of immunomics – including applications of genomics, proteomics, me-tabolomics and personalised medicine – to the study of the immune system and diseases thereof. This includes the sub-speciality of immunoinformatics, a term I coined with Vladimir Brusic in 2002 to a meeting spon-sored by the Novartis Foundation that was held in London in 2002 under the title “Immunoinformatics: Bioinformatic strategies for better understanding of immune func-tion” [4,5]. That meeting brought together for the first time experts from a wide array of dif-ferent disciplines including immunology, bio-informatics and mathematical modeling, to discuss how we might help to move immunol-ogy research into the post-genomics world. From this highly successful meeting, the pub-lished proceedings of which remain one of the most successful and highly sought Novartis Symposium Proceedings [6], many initiatives came to life including the formation of the International Immunomics Society in 2003 under the Foundation President, Hans-Georg Rammensee. Immunome Research was offi-cially launched in 2005 under a five-year pub-lishing agreement with the open-access pub-lisher, BioMedCentral [1]. The decision to adopt the open-access format of publication was taken, despite approaches from several traditional subscription-based publishers to host the new journal, as I felt that it was criti-cal for the immunomics field that all pub-lished papers in the new field be immediately accessible to all scientists, particularly those outside the field, to encourage them to start to apply these new cutting-edge immunomics tools and principles to their own research, thereby helping grow the field [7]. This was important, as at that time, there was no spe-cialty journal covering the new and rapidly expanding immunomics domain and research-ers in immunomics were forced to publish their research in predominantly subscription-based immunology or bioinformatics journals. Immunome Research was established to meet the need for a high-quality specialist immu-nomics journal to provide a focal point for the new field of immunomics and also to guide the development of consistent standards for the conduct and publication of immunomics research. For example, Immunome Re-search has played an important role in the publication of key results from the Immune Epitope Database Project, a major NIH-funded project managed by Alessandro Sette‟s group that for the last five years has been ex-haustively mapping, curating and analyzing both T- and B-cell epitopes [8-11]. It has also published key findings from the international ImMunoGeneTics information system, which has been a world-leading project in mapping the structures and function of major histocom-patibility complex molecules [12,13] and from DC-Atlas, a major European initiative to dis-sect all signaling pathways in dendritic cells [14]. Over the last five years since the founding of Immunome Research enormous changes have taken place within the immunomics field, not only in the world of publishing but within sci-ence generally. Of paramount importance, the key objective of the original Novartis Sympo-sium has been achieved in that the field of im-