An Open Forum for Computational Biology

I t is my pleasure to welcome you to PLoS Computational Biology. The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is proud to be, with the Public Library of Science, the co-sponsor of this journal. We believe that PLoS Computational Biology will rapidly become a leading journal in the area of computational biology and, as an official journal of ISCB, will be an important venue in which ISCB members will publish their findings and learn of the work of others, both ISCB members and nonmembers. New journals appear at frequent intervals these days, and one may well ask: why a new computational biology journal? PLoS and ISCB feel that there is both need and interest in a journal with a new focus and new approach to computational biology. This feeling grows out of our recognition of the enormous changes that computation has wrought in both science and communication. In contrast to the situation of only a decade or so ago, almost every area of biology is now affected and enhanced by computational studies. But until the appearance of PLoS Computational Biology, there has been no single publication with a focus on the important contributions of computational studies to the understanding of living systems. PLoS Computational Biology meets this need and provides a forum in which experimentalists and computational scientists can meet, exchange ideas, and develop new solutions to biological questions. The revolution in communication that has grown out of the Internet and World Wide Web infrastructure provides the other motivating force behind the creation of a new journal. Free availability of protein and nucleic acid sequences, protein structures, and other biological data is critical to practitioners of computational biology— support of open-access journals is