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The economy is in tumult. Science is in a permanent state of revolution. And communications technology remakes itself from year to year.
A journal is an economic creature, a scientific undertaking, and a communications enterprise. By rights we ought to, but too seldom do, reinvent ourselves periodically.
This month, our new graphic design emerges from its chrysalis and spreads its wings. Done correctly, redesigning a publication begins with a radical analysis of its mission. Years ago, I used to work in the only New York City building designed by Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, who said, “Form ever follows function.” Biologists of all people should recognize the wisdom of this, while realizing that the relationship is commutative: function also follows form.
We live at the boundary between two communication models. In the age of ink, the scarce resources are paper, press time, and postage. In the age of the LCD, the scarcer resource is the readers’ time.
The challenge is to make the best of both worlds. The new print BioTechniques is more compact, so that we can present more papers in less space, conserving trees and postage. It's also designed to be easier to read, with more subheadings and clearer type, so that readers can use their time more efficiently. In a link to the second world, we have augmented the table of contents to alert readers to an ever-expanding online offering.
And so the new print design is just part of the story: This month, we'll unveil our overhauled web site, incorporating a BioTechniques Protocol Wiki, a revitalized BioMarkets (a supplier and product directory), and a greatly improved search facility. Along with the offerings of BioTechniques.com, readers will be introduced to a new network of affiliated journals (beginning next month with Biotechnic & Histochemistry, a journal of tools for visualizing biological processes).
The BioTechniques Protocol Wiki, in fact, went online for testing in January (1). This is a free, open-access service, built on the same software that runs Wikipedia. It will offer a searchable, community-maintained collection of protocols, and will complement the six-year-old Molecular Biology Forum (2). Think of the Wiki as the lab manual, and the Forums as the help line.
The changes will seem modest at first. Most of the improvement is under the hood, a shift to modern data storage and presentation approaches that will allow BioTechniques to adapt rapidly to the new opportunities hidden in the challenges of the economy, communication technology, and—above all—the science.
