mBio’s First Birthday

T he 2011 ASM General Meeting in New Orleans will mark the first-year anniversary of the official launching of mBio. It has been a remarkable year that witnessed the growth and success of the first ASM open-access online-only general-type journal. Since its launch, mBio has published 100 articles, of which 51 were contributed by members of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) through the direct contribution track (1). The support of mBio by AAM members has been a critical element in the initial success of the journal, as Academy members have provided a constant stream of superb papers that helped establish a high standard for scientific excellence. mBio has achieved many indexing successes in its first year. mBio is now indexed in at least 36 journal indexes, including Of significant importance is mBio's inclusion and indexing in MEDLINE. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) uses an advisory committee of authorities knowledgeable in the field of bio-medicine to review and recommend journal titles that the NLM should index. While the inclusion alone is worth noting, only 20% to 25% of the titles reviewed are selected for indexing Even more remarkable is that this was accomplished in March 2011, less than a year after the first issue was published, which reflects the strength of mBio's scientific content. Apart from the successful logistics of launching a new journal, evidence of success is apparent in the many outstanding mBio papers that have attracted considerable attention in the general media and that are some of the most frequently read articles. An early example of the excellence mBio strives for was our first article , contributed by Peter Palese and colleagues, detailing the generation of a vaccine against influenza virus based on the conserved hemagglutinin stalk domain (2). Similarly, mBio was proud to publish the landmark evolutionary observation of horizontal gene transfer from humans to bacteria, an article that rightfully elicited great general media interest, by Mark Anderson and H. Steven Seifert (3). The observation by Alan Leviton's group that the maternal microbiome modulates inflammatory responses in very young preterm babies shows how the mBio scope includes clinical microbiological observations (4). mBio also hosted a commentary by Anthony Fauci and colleagues at the NIAID/NIH on the future of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that thoughtfully discussed various possibilities ahead (5). The articles mentioned above are some of the highlights for our first year and illustrate the extraordinarily …