A few weeks ago, we published a series of articles (Edwards NJ, Feala et al, Lu et al, McCord et al, Shlomi et al, Ulitsky and Shamir, Zhou X et al, 2007) that were initially presented at the RECOMB Workshop on Systems Biology . According to the publication model agreed upon, peer-reviewed articles were presented orally at the conference and a subset of those were invited for revision and ultimately published in Molecular Systems Biology. Publication of research paper at a conference is very popular in computer sciences and bioinformatics, but it is a rarely applied model in biology (Ideker et al, 2007).

I see several several major incentives for this type of collaboration between a conference and a journal, particularly for an emerging field like systems biology. First, it may help the journal to stay more in sync with a rapidly evolving community. Second, it may well stimulate presentation of novel and exciting research at the conference (and perhaps reduce somewhat the proportion of talks reporting only previously published data…). Finally, the proximity in time between public presentation, direct discussion with peers and ultimately publication in a journal may accelerate the dissemination of results and increase the pace of the field.

We wish now to extend this joint conference/journal presentation model by entering a collaboration this year with the International Conference for Systems Biology, to be held in Long Beach, California, from October 1-6, 2007. Authors of the best abstracts from the conference will be invited to submit the corresponding research articles to Molecular Systems Biology. Manuscripts will go

through the standard review procedure of the journal, but if accepted, the publication fees will be paid by ICSB 2007. A special online issue of Molecular Systems Biology devoted to ICSB 2007 will feature the accepted articles.

More information on the precise procedure on the abstract submission page of the Conference. Deadline for submission of the abstracts: July 27th, 2007!