On the future contents of a small journal of histochemistry

Abstract

In the last three years, more than 70,000 sci-entific articles have been published in peer reviewed journals on the application of histo-chemistry in the biomedical field: most of them did not appear in strictly histochemical journals, but in others dealing with cell and molecular biology, medicine or biotechnology. This proves that histochemistry is still an active and innovative discipline with relevance in basic and applied biological research, but also demonstrates that especially the small histochemical journals should likely reconsid-er their scopes and strategies to preserve their authorship. A review of the last three years vol-umes of the European Journal of Histoche-mistry, taken as an example of a long-time established small journal, confirmed that the published articles were widely heterogeneous in their topics and experimental models, as in this journal's tradition. This strongly suggests that a journal of histochemistry should keep its role as a forum open to an audience as broad as possible, publishing papers on cell and tis-sue biology in a wide variety of models. This will improve knowledge of the basic mecha-nisms of development and differentiation, while helping to increase the number of poten-tial authors since scientists who generally do not use histochemistry in their research will find hints for the applications of histochemical techniques to novel still unexplored subjects. Non- nals which may be appealing in the present sit-uation of generalized grant shortening. Under this scenario, especially the small journals should probably reconsider their scope and strategies, in the attempt to pre-serve their readership and the possibility to receive a sufficient number of good manu-scripts to be selected for publication. Survival of a journal depends on the capability of saving and extending its authorship, and to this aim the present trends in the application of histo-chemistry should be considered while taking into account the authors' interests as they result from the articles published in recent years. © C. Pellicciari, 2012.