Abstract
Having founded two successful and indexed journals devoted to the clinical features of gender-specific medicine, the decision to establish yet another was an important one. The impetus to launch Gender and the Genome, the official journal of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, was defined by the fact that one of the most important paradigm shifts in human history marked the beginning of this century, with the publication of the description of the human genome. Arguably, this was one of the two or three most important advances in the human experience; having defined what produced and governed the human phenotype, we correctly anticipated that altering the genome’s composition and eventually creating entirely new, synthetic genomes in the laboratory would all quickly become possible. That has proven to be the case. Thus, a useful and contemporaneous new journal had to focus not only on the molecular mechanisms responsible for the phenotype but on the impact of biological sex on gene behavior both in the natural state and as modified by experimental manipulation.
The idea of studying the relevance of gender to biology in the genomic era was fortified when the third edition of The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine: Gender in the Genomic Era 1 won the prestigious Prose Award for the best book published in clinical medicine in 2018. The concept that motivated our undertaking a new, more contemporaneous approach in creating the third edition of the textbook was to expand what had been a view of gender-specific medicine based on clinical observations of the whole individual. A similarly focused journal was obviously an inevitable next undertaking and thus we founded Gender and the Genome.
One of our most important goals is to publish the news of the science we report not only to the general scientific community but to the educated lay public that provides the bulk of the financial support to the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. We believe that the lay public, either directly or through its impact on governing bodies and foundations, is a principal driving force for research funding.
As Gender and the Genome enters its second year of publication, we shifted our business model to one of open access, allowing for the content of the journal to be freely available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Finding appropriate colleagues and an equally motivated publishing partner to ensure the success and expansion of the new journal has taken a careful effort. Our new associate editors, Dr Jasna Markovac and Dr Marek Glezerman, lead a newly formed steering committee to help shape the trajectory of the new issues. Equally important, we have contracted with a new publisher, SAGE Publishing. Founded by Sara Miller McCune in 1965, the company produces over 1000 journals and 800 books annually. 2 In 2016, 49% of their journals ranked within the top half of their subject category. Two hundred thirty-three titles now list in the top 30% of the Journal Citation Reports and over one hundred have a top 10 category rank. Both the Foundation and SAGE emphasize the importance of communicating published scientific work to the public and to policy makers. We look forward to a long and successful collaboration.
Gender and the Genome is the official journal not only of the Foundation but also of the Israeli Society for Gender and Sex Conscious Medicine and of the International Society of Gender-Specific Medicine. These affiliations provide us with a cohort of scientists (and potential authors) specifically focused on investigating the impact of sex/gender on human physiology and the sex-specific experience of disease. So, Gender and the Genome begins another year with a seasoned publisher and an editorial board of unparalled quality. We anticipate a solid and ever-expanding future.
We are grateful for the support of Robert S. Birch in the establishment of the Robert S. Birch Award honoring outstanding papers in our journal. We also acknowledge with gratitude the generous unrestricted grant from Isobel and Marvin Slomowitz that has made our new business model and our new partnership a most exciting reality.