The centenary of Hereditas - almost a fairytale
- PDF / 446,642 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 194 Views
EDITORIAL
Open Access
The centenary of Hereditas - almost a fairytale Yongyong Shi1 and Stefan Baumgartner2*
Abstract This is the Editorial for a series of articles illuminating the history and success story of Hereditas, one of the oldest journals in the area of genetics. For this reason, we invite you to read this special series on a journal with a distinct reputation and which can celebrate its Centenary in 2020.
Background The fairytale of Hereditas began in 1920 when a group of geneticists, the previous founders of the Mendelian Society in Lund in 1910 decided that they needed a platform to be able to publish scientific articles and to reach out to colleagues and scientists outside of Sweden. This led to the establishment of Hereditas in 1920. The sequence of events is meticulously narrated by [1]. Two protagonists promoting the foundation of Hereditas should be named here: Herman Nilsson-Ehle (1873– 1949) and Robert Larsson (1885–1956). The latter also became the first Editor-in-Chief (EiC) holding this post for more than 3 decades from 1920 to 1954, followed by Arne Müntzing (1955–1977), Arne Lundqvist (1978– 1988), Karl Fredga and Arne Lundqvist (1989–1996), Ulf Gyllensten (1996–2001), Anssi Saura (2002–2011), Stefan Baumgartner (2012 -), and Yongyong Shi (2016 -, in parallel to Baumgartner). In 2005, an important decision was taken by the EiC at the time, Anssi Saura, to change the subscription format of Hereditas to open-access (OA), thus helping to pioneer the path of OA-journals. This led to an increase of submissions and provided immediate access to Hereditas to all scientists world-wide. Another wise decision was taken in 2011 when the owner of Hereditas, the Mendelian Society of Lund, sponsored by the Erik * Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Department of Experimental Medical Sciences, Lund University, 22100 Lund, Sweden Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Philip-Sörensen Foundation, decided to digitalize all back-issues from the very first one in 1920 (Fig. 1). It was an extraordinarily important decision to ensure that all back-issues were available to the scientific readership. In 2013 and 2014, the journal experienced a dramatic drop of submissions which forced the EiC to terminate its activity at the end of 2014. In an astonishing turn of events, a few months later, the journal experienced a resurrection with the collaboration with a new publisher, Springer Nature which in retrospect became an extremely beneficial union for both sides. We have divided this Centenary issue into topical areas. These sections represent prominently covered topics by Hereditas over the last 100 years: cytogenetics, race biology, crop genetics and evolution. The topical series will be complemented by a bibliometric overview on all articles published by Hereditas. Some of the articles proved to be “high flyers” with a high number of citations. Of note is a report in the area of cytogenetics on a proposal for a common nomenclature for centromeric positions on chromoso
Data Loading...
