Another Productive Year

Joep Geraedts ^*

Emeritus Professor, Department of Genetics and Cell Biology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands

* Correspondence: Joep Geraedts

Received: January 14, 2020 | Accepted: January 14, 2020 | Published: January 14, 2020

OBM Genetics 2020, Volume 4, Issue 1, doi:10.21926/obm.genet.2001102

Recommended citation:Geraedts J. Another Productive Year. OBM Genetics 2020; 4(1): 102; doi:10.21926/obm.genet.2001102.

© 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is correctly cited.

1. Introduction

At the beginning of a new year it is always good to look both backwards and forwards and to highlight a few items that are relevant with respect to the long-term development of our journal. As everybody knows, the principle of open access publishing is that the authors pay fees (the article‐processing charges or APCs) to publish in the journal rather than that the readers pay subscription costs for the journal. Three years ago, OBM Genetics started as an open access journal publishing its first papers totally free of charge and it has done so till the end of 2019 in order to attract high-quality papers. This policy has been successful.

Furthermore, the strong editorial board and the professional handling of the manuscripts in terms of high-quality reviewing, production, publication and archiving has added to this policy. In particular the decision to aim at the publication of special issues has resulted in submissions of the majority of manuscripts in this category. This resulted from the invitation of very well-respected colleagues to become guest editors. On the basis of invitations by these guest editors and some members of the editorial board as well in 2019 not less than 39 out of 43 manuscripts have been published in special issues (Table 1).

Table 1 Published papers in special issues.

The plans for next year are to increase the number of articles published, especially from countries and regions not yet represented in the following distribution overview (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Authorship region distribution.

Furthermore, we aim at publishing more original research articles, compared with the following distribution of published papers by type in 2019 (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Published papers by type in 2019.

2. Special Issue Books

At the request of some authors and guest editors, in order to facilitate citations and publicity, and to better promote our journal and attract more readers and authors, two Special Issue books have been published in 2019: “Genetic Screening”, edited by Joanne Traeger-Synodinos and François Rousseau and “Epigenetic Mechanisms in Health and Disease” edited by Stéphane Viville and Marcel Mannens (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Special issue books in 2019.

These books, containing 9 resp. 19 articles published in these special issues in 2018 and 2019 are now available as printed copies from the publisher.

The total number of website visits (through Google) to OBM Genetics in 2019 was 39,420, while the total number of visits to the LIDSEN website was 258,962.

Since OBM Genetics is currently not indexed by the Web of Science, it is difficult for us to calculate the total citation times of papers published in each year.

The article “Deletion of Subtelomeric Regions in the Linear Chromosome of Variants Isolated from Streptomyces avermitilis NBRC 14893T” by Hisayuki Komaki and Tomohiko Tamura (Received: April 19, 2019; Published: August 23, 2019; doi:10.21926/obm.genet.1903091) was downloaded not less than 1415 times.

In 2019 the peer-review period was again shorter than before. Manuscripts have been undertaken in 8.5 days from acceptance to publication. This should be of help to convince you or your colleagues to submit a manuscript. Furthermore, if you have a proposal for a Special Issues, which is not yet announced at the home page of our website, please get in touch with our editorial office with your suggestions.

Again this year I should forget to acknowledge the many active members of the Editorial Board (see Addendum 1), who contributed a lot to the development of the journal, the many colleagues who have again contributed high quality reviews (see Addendum 2) and the excellent editorial team at the OBM Genetics Editorial Office (LIDSEN Publishing lnc.) who very professionally took care of handling all submissions through the reviewing and editorial processes to publication. I look forward to working together with this dedicated staff to make 2020 another successful and productive year by efficiently publishing high-quality manuscripts of many interesting articles from already existing and new authors on the basis of important reports from our growing group of referees to the continued interest of our readers.

Joep Geraedts, Editor in Chief

Addendum 1 List of editorial board members 2019.

Addendum 2 List of reviewers in 2019.