The Journal of Bacteriology Is 100.

After discussions that date to the founding of the Society of American Bacteriologists (SAB) in 1899 and despite predictions of financial failure and objections that there were already more than enough scientific journals, it was officially decided to start the Journal of Bacteriology (JB) at the SAB meeting in Urbana, IL, in December 1915. After that decision was finally made, things moved rapidly. Volume 1 of the journal, dated January 1916, which appeared in press several months later, contained a foreword about the new science of bacteriology by W. T. Sedgwick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a Presidential Address by D. H. Bergey (University of Pennsylvania), the abstracts of the papers presented at the Urbana meeting, and four scientific papers. The editor in chief (EIC) of the new journal was C.-E. A. Winslow (Yale University), and he served in this capacity for an extraordinary 28 years. Sedgwick was one of 22 advisory editors, and Bergey was one of 32 abstract editors listed on the original masthead. The third EIC of JB, J. R. Porter, wrote a detailed history of the founding of the journal that appeared in ASM News in 1974 (1). (The SAB became the American Society for Microbiology [ASM] in 1960.) G. C. Walker, the eighth EIC of JB, wrote a beautifully crafted summary of the illustrious history and growth of the journal into the highly respected scientific publication that so effectively serves the microbiology community today (2). Indeed, it is currently the second most highly cited journal in this field. These references should be consulted for a detailed discussion of the history and growth of the journal. There are, however, a couple of historical facts that I would revisit. JB was a financial success right from the start, and the agreement worked out between the society and the publisher, Williams and Wilkins Company, is remarkable in that regard. The society agreed to provide high-quality manuscripts to the publisher, who in turn would publish them at no cost to the society. However, if there were profits, the society would get 60%! According to Porter, this was apparently done by gentleman’s agreement, and it is hard to imagine this happening today. Indeed, the scientific publishing industry has changed dramatically since then. Here I reprint the first sentence of the Announcement that justifies publishing JB that appeared in volume 1: “Although there are numerous journals in the United States that deal with various special phases of bacteriology (as applied to Medicine, Sanitary Science, Agriculture and the like), there has been no journal in the English language to represent the science as a whole.” This justification turns out to be ironic, because today ASM publishes 15 academic journals covering all aspects of the field of microbiology, most of which have been spun off JB. Challenges. The most critical issue facing JB is the decreasing number of submissions. The reasons for this are multifaceted, and here I will describe what I think are the major causes. First on the list is impact factor (IF). I can understand why administrators want a quantitative measure of high-quality research. What I do not understand is why scientists allow and accept the use of such a terribly inappropriate number as the IF. Many have written about the serious limitations of the IF, and I have never seen someone of any consequence defend it, yet it remains, many journals flaunt it, and many administrators ignore any journal below an arbitrary IF number. It is especially unfortunate for JB because of Genome Announcements. As a community service we published an increasingly large number of these before the new Genome Announcements journal was spun off. As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Despite our rigorous objections, these were counted as peer-reviewed research articles (they are not), thus increasing the denominator and reducing the IF alarmingly. It will take several years for these announcements to wash out of the calculation completely. In many ways the IF is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When it goes down, scientists send their best work elsewhere, so we must work especially hard to reverse the drop caused by the announcements. The number of new microbiology journals is increasing rapidly. Publishers have learned that there is money to be made not by selling journals, the way it used to be, but by charging authors. For most of these new journals the scope includes the science of microbiology as a whole, much like the original intention for JB. However, as noted above, JB has spun off many new ASM journals, and each time this happened, the scope statement was rewritten. Until recently the JB scope statement was really a rather lengthy list of topics that JB would not consider because they were more appropriate for other ASM journals. Our chief competitors do not suffer this limitation. Many young scientists regard the Journal of Bacteriology as stodgy and old-fashioned, and they choose to submit their papers to journals with more cachet. Despite the high regard with which JB is held in the field, in far too many cases, the mentors of these young scientists agree. Meeting the challenges. Last year we rewrote the scope statement to demonstrate the breadth of our interests: Journal of Bacteriology publishes research articles that probe fundamental processes in bacteria, archaea and their viruses, and the molecular mechanisms by which they interact with each other and with their hosts and their environments. The principal guiding the decisions of the JB editors is to publish papers reporting the highest-quality research and to not bias