Editor’s
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Laura L. Kiessling University of Wisconsin, Madison BOARD OF EDITORS
Jennifer A. Doudna University of California, Berkeley
Kai Johnsson Ecole Polytechnique Fe´de´rale de Lausanne
LETTER ACS Chemical Biology Abstracts in PubMed!
Anna K. Mapp University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michael A. Marletta University of California, Berkeley
Peter H. Seeberger Eidgeno¨ssische Technische Hochschule
James R. Williamson The Scripps Research Institute EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Carolyn R. Bertozzi University of California, Berkeley
Brian T. Chait Rockefeller University
Tim Clackson ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Jon C. Clardy Harvard Medical School
Benjamin F. Cravatt The Scripps Research Institute
Peter B. Dervan California Institute of Technology
Rebecca W. Heald University of California, Berkeley
Linda C. Hsieh-Wilson California Institute of Technology
Tony Hunter Salk Institute
Stephen C. Kowalczykowski University of California, Davis
Richard H. Kramer University of California, Berkeley
Thomas V. O’Halloran Northwestern University
Hiroyuki Osada RIKEN
Anna M. Pyle Yale University
Ronald T. Raines University of Wisconsin, Madison
Charles Sawyers University of California, Los Angeles
Stuart L. Schreiber Harvard University
Peter G. Schultz The Scripps Research Institute
Michael P. Sheetz
W
e’re pleased to announce that ACS Chemical Biology (ACS CB) is approved for indexing in MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) database of indexed journal citations and abstracts. Your abstracts will soon appear in PubMed searches. Our content can also be found in the Chemical Abstracts Service, with the ISI Web of Science, and through Google searches. For those of you who published with us in 2006, rest assured that all of our content will be indexed in PubMed. For those future authors who were waiting for this milestone, it’s time to submit your papers to our journal. Many of you have asked why it takes so long to see the abstracts from new journals in PubMed. Here’s why. A journal must publish four issues before it can apply for indexing in MEDLINE. The application process is straightforward—fill in a web form describing the content of the journal, some stats, and review and production criteria. Once the application is submitted, and if the subject matter is within MEDLINE’s scope, the journal is scheduled for review. Here’s what takes so long: the review process only happens a few times a year, so a journal launched at the start of the year will not usually be reviewed until October. The NLM’s Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC) determines which journals will be indexed in MEDLINE. This 15-member advisory committee includes physicians, researchers, educators, editors, health science librarians, and even historians. The review process is similar to that for a National Institutes of Health grant: primary and secondary reviewers are chosen, and many criteria are used, including subject matter, quality of content, importance of the papers to those in the biomedical field, the rigor of the editorial practices, and the quality of the production. According to the NLM, only 25–30% of titles reviewed are selected for indexing. Several weeks after the LSTRC meets, the publisher is notified whether the title is selected for indexing. If the news is positive, the publisher must send a test feed of the journal content to PubMed to establish the lines of communication. Once the technical bugs are worked out and PubMed performs its quality-control checks on the delivered material, the journal content (including back issues) is automatically fed to the NLM. Soon afterward, abstracts of the journal’s content appear in PubMed searches. We are currently sending all ACS CB content to the NLM, and we expect our abstracts to appear in PubMed searches in 2007 (a few short weeks from now). Thanks to all of our 2006 authors for publishing with us and for their patience as we completed the NLM indexing process. For those researchers who have not yet published with ACS CB, our manuscript submission system (https://acs.manuscriptcentral.com/acs) is standing by to receive your great papers!
Columbia University
H. Ulrich Stilz Sanofi-Aventis, Frankfurt
Christopher T. Walsh Harvard Medical School
Evelyn Jabri Executive Editor 10.1021/cb600466j CCC: $33.50 Published online December 15, 2006 © 2006 by American Chemical Society
www.acschemicalbiology.org
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