New Editor-in-Chief of JB

Abstract

I am honored to be assigned to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biochemistry (JB) from January 2014. The first issue of JB appeared in 1922 before the Japanese Biochemical Society was established in 1925. Thus, JB is one of the oldest journals in the biochemical field in the world and at present this journal covers many life science fields, including molecular biology, cell biology and biotechnology. My job is to continue the long history of JB and to explore new and challenging opportunities for JB. The former Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Kohei Miyazono, made a huge effort on the journal. During his leadership from 2010 to 2013, JB received about 300–400 manuscripts and accepted 70–100 papers per year. By rapid handling of the submitted manuscripts due to great efforts of Prof. Miyazono, editors, associate editors, reviewers and editorial staff, the average number of days to primary decision was 20 days. The current trend is the rise in submissions from overseas countries, especially China, India and Korea and a half of total submissions come from foreign countries. The Impact Factors increased to 2.719 in 2012 from 1.945 in 2009, indicating that JB published important papers in which researchers are interested. Highly cited articles during 2009–12 are shown in Table I.