cell news 2/2013
2
preface
Consolidation of fnancial affairs
Critical questions have been raised at the last DGZ members meeting in Heidelberg in March concerning the fnancial situation of the
society and the support of young scientists. The society was facing a variety of structural changes within the last fve years including
the organization and co-funding of special interest meetings, a new web appearance, and a complete new format and label of our
members’ Journal Cell News. These measures very much improved the national and international visibility of the German Society for
Cell Biology and highly supported the cell biology community in Germany. However, the measures were cost intensive and over the
last years continuously consumed most of the savings of the DGZ. The new executive board, which took over a year ago was challen-
ged from the beginning to keep up with the new ideas and to consolidate fnances at the same time. We are working since then to
navigate the society in a way that we can keep the German Society for Cell Biology a modern, attractive, and international interacting
society. We will therefore go on to support two special interest meetings per year, one in spring and one in fall. We hope to establish
this routine in 2014. The special interest meetings should have strong poster sessions and include as many poster short talks as pos-
sible to support young scientists. As soon as the fnancial situation has improved (we foresee a positive fnancial development this
year), we plan to revive/promote our travel grant system for graduate students and younger post-docs for DGZ meetings and selected
international meetings such as the ASCB meeting.
Cell News goes online
We also will go on with our members’ journal in a modern, electronic format. Also given the fact that the actual costs of the Journal
used up one third of the member fees, we decided to develop an online journal with all the advances of novel information techno-
logies. Cell News has developed over the years into a valuable resource of information as well as excellent platform for upcoming
and established Cell Biologists to present themselves and their ongoing research. We feel that the new online format will allow fully
exploiting all the advantages of modern information technologies. For instance, we will be able to show videos and supplements, and
the new format will be increasingly attractive for advertising companies. The novel Cell News format will have its own homepage,
PDF fles of all articles, and will include a new Cell News App for smart phones and tablet computers.
Despite our efforts to re-structure our annual conference schedules and to modernize the publishing mode of Cell News, it was also
necessary to slightly increase our member fees (NEW: EUR 60 full member, EUR 40 double member, EUR 20 student member), which
was fully supported by participants of our last members meeting in March. Together, we are convinced that all these activities will
consolidate the society’s fnancial situation and thus ensure our various future activities.
Eugen Kerkhoff
Eliminating the impact of the impact factor:
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
When you navigate through the homepage of the
Journal of Cell Biology
you will learn that chief editor Tom Misteli’s comment on the
call against the
’numerical measure of a scientists work’
using the Impact Factor (IF) climbed up to the currently most read contribu-
tion in JCB. EMBOs chief Editor Bernd Pulverer caught up and wrote an equally excellent statement in the last issue of
EMBO Journal
.
Both editorial comments explain that during last year’s American Society of Cell Biology meeting in San Francisco
’a group of promi-
nent journal editors and publishers of scholarly journals, as well as representatives from major funding agencies and research institu-
tions‘
spoke up
’as one voice to highlight the limitations of the IF and to call for a concerted effort to improve the ways scientifc output
is assessed by funding agencies, academic institutions, and scientists themselves‘.
Their consultations yielded
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
, found at the URL am.ascb.org/dora/ of the ASCB.
The declaration raises a number of issues against the abuse of the IF, point by point, suggested to be considered by funding agencies,
institutions, publishers, organizations that supply metrics, and ourselves, the researchers. So far, the declaration has been signed by
close to 8000 individual scientists and 300 organizations, among them the German Society of Cell Biology and the VBIO. Board and
Scientifc Advisors of the DGZ unanimously decided to do so and we hope that many of you as DGZ members or just scientists inte-
rested in cell biology will follow our example.
DGZ Board Members
