Fight Aging!

Via the Gerontology Research Group mailing list, news from the scientific publishing side of the house: Rejuvenation Research is now officially a success. As if there was any doubt, what with the attention publisher Mary Ann Liebert has started to lavish upon the journal. Here's the scoop from the GRG:

The 2005 impact factors were announced yesterday, including the inaugural impact factor for Rejuvenation Research. I'm pleased to tell you that we obtained the very agreeable ranking of 8.571. This puts us at No. 1 in the "Gerontology and Geriatrics" category by a large margin, even including Aging Cell at 6.013 (which, for whatever reason, is not listed in that category). For a wider comparison, we would be No. 20 in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and No. 17 in Cell Biology, ahead of such prominent titles as Human Mol Genet, NAR, FASEB J, MCB, MBC, JCS, and Oncogene. (BTW, I'm working with our Publisher Mary-Ann Liebert of New York to try to get us listed in those two categories.) Moreover, a rough calculation based on available data suggests that this is not a fluke arising from our conveniently small denominator this year -- we will be around the same level next year.

In contrast to the journal from which RR sprang ("Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine" edited by Michael Fossel, M.D., Ph.D.), Rejuvenation Research is primarily a research journal. Though reports of a more clinical nature are also considered, the overall remit of RR is a broad definition of aging-related regenerative medicine -- in other words, any research that can be viewed as having potential relevance to eventual aging-related regenerative medicine, even if only in the longer term. Please bear this in mind both when considering submitting articles and when you recommend RR to colleagues (as I trust you often do!).

Acting as the editor of a growing scientific journal is something akin to herding cats - if cats had wings. Congratulations are due to editor-in-chief Aubrey de Grey for successfully relaunching a noted research journal as a glowing success in the field - at the same time as flying around the world to present at more or less every conference of interest to healthy life extension science and its funding, guiding the growth of the Methuselah Foundation and MPrize hand-in-hand with Dave Gobel, Kevin Perrott and the other volunteers, sitting on the boards of half a dozen active organizations and keeping up a book's worth of email and forum correspondence with the healthy life extension community. Impressive stuff.

Technorati tags: anti-aging, gerontology, life extension, medical research, science