Our Advisors, Our Ambassadors, Our Editorial Board Members

Abstract

It is March, and the spring is definitely in the air here in Cambridge, MA, USA where Cell Press offices are located. If we said that, like the nature around us itself, Cell Chemical Biology editorial team is ready to spring into action that would be an understatement. Ever since the first issue of Cell Chemical Biology came out two months ago, we have been working hard to spread our message across the field of chemical biology and broader biomedical community to raise visibility and awareness of all the meaningful changes we are enacting. In return, we have been getting messages of support from the community and we are grateful and humbled by your enthusiasm and encouragement. That type of overwhelmingly positive feedback strengthens our confidence that re-launching Chemistry & Biology under the name of Cell Chemical Biology was the right thing to do for the journal and the field.One of the key groups of people that we have been interacting with a great deal throughout this process is our Editorial Board. We reached out to some members of the Editorial Board more than two years ago to get initial reactions on the idea to change the title to Cell Chemical Biology and these conversations really helped us shape the vision for the future. Additionally, people on our Editorial Board continued to provide us with the advice on more specific questions, such as suggestions for potential review article content and hot topics that would benefit from critical discussion. We plan to follow up on many of those and use interesting review type content to bring out a more complex flavor of the journal.Lastly, our Editorial Board Members actively participated in the process of Editorial Board expansion that we just went through. In preparation for relaunch we approached our existing Editorial Board to share that one of the big components of our strategy for making Cell Chemical Biology a success will be centered around rethinking our scope and the types of studies that we want to publish. In addition to “traditional” chemical biology studies that use chemical tools to perturb, visualize and measure properties of biological systems to build a better view of molecular mechanism and physiology, or those that are centered on biochemical mechanism and how to engineer it to increase chemical diversity of biosynthetic small molecules, we want Cell Chemical Biology to be home for studies that ask questions about metabolism and metabolites, as well as small molecule-protein and small molecule-nucleic acid conjugates especially those that push our appreciation for what specific post-translational and epigenetic modifications are doing. We are also excited about studies that combine the use proteomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, glycomics and other methods that offer systems level view of biology and transform those insights into a deeper mechanistic understanding. Even this expanded list it not all, as we see exciting work being done across the range of traditional biological disciplines, such as genetics, cell biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, immunology, as well as more recent areas of stem cell research and synthetic biology. We believe that chemical biology touches all aspects of biological research and we wanted to highlight this through opening up our scope.We also want our Editorial Board to reflect the diversity of science that the journal is interested in, and together with the Chemistry & Biology Editorial Board Members we worked hard to identify the type of expertise that we need in order to cover all the subject matter we were getting excited about, and find the diverse group of people to bring on board. Over the last several months we welcomed many new Editorial Board Members that have diverse scientific interests, and hail from all over the world. Additionally they also come from different stages in their scientific careers and we brought on board not only well-established senior scientists, but an exceptional group of up-and-coming next generation leaders.We are excited to have this fantastic group of advisors and ambassadors supporting Cell Chemical Biology. You may wonder what it is that our Editorial Board Members do, and it is a fair question. Our Editorial Board members don’t handle manuscripts and are not responsible for overseeing the peer review process or serving as the default reviewer pool. What we expect from our Editorial Board members is to be our ambassadors in their local and global scientific communities, and we count on them to promote the journal as a place for their colleagues and their field to publish exciting results. We depend on our Editorial Board Members to tell us what’s exciting in their area of research and what the future might bring, as well as to alert us if there are any changes to current best practices and standards in the field that we should know about. This helps us evolve our policies and criteria. Additionally, we rely on our Editorial Board Members to help us untangle complicated editorial decisions or adjudicate disputes that sometimes erupt between authors and reviewers.Editorial Board Members are our go-to group of scientists when we are thinking about new article formats, new features, or new initiatives and we look to them to point out not only exciting aspect of changes that we are thinking about but openly voice their concerns as well. For example, one significant concern that some members of our Editorial Board had during the relaunch process was that our emphasis on tackling difficult biological problems, problems that those in biology care deeply about will negatively impact the quality of chemistry we publish and rob us of our chemical heritage. We are still talking about this and have yet to reach the point where we feel this issue is put to rest, but as with other issues in the past these types of discussions help us understand the thinking and concerns in the field, and we are thrilled to have the Editorial Board that continues to challenge us to do right by the field.From day one, our goals for the journal have been lofty – we want Cell Chemical Biology to be home for the most exciting chemical biology research where chemical creativity meets biological complexity, and the two enhance each other to create insights into toughest scientific questions. We feel that having enthusiastic group of advisors and ambassadors on our Editorial Board will make achieving these goals easier and definitely more enjoyable.