Biomedical computation magazine to make its debut
The quarterly is published at Stanford.
This month, a team of Stanford researchers will publish the first issue of a new quarterly magazine called Biomedical Computation Review. It's part of an innovative outreach plan for a $20-million biomedical computing center at Stanford, called Simbios (Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures), funded by the National Institutes of Health.
"Starting a magazine is not exactly a typical activity for federally-funded research projects," said Russ Altman, MD, PhD, a principal investigator on the Simbios grant and one of the magazine's founders. "But the field of biomedical computing is so new and so multidisciplinary that we wanted to create a publication that would cut across fields to create a sense of kinship among this diverse set of researchers."
Altman, professor of genetics, bioengineering and medicine, hopes that by providing a publication written at the level of an educated but unspecialized scientist, members of the field will discover connections they didn't know existed.
"We also thought that contributing a periodical that filled the 'fun and informative' niche would be more novel than other dissemination options such as attending conferences, teaching short courses and writing scientific papers (all of which we do as well)," Altman said.
Modeling itself after popular science magazines such as Discover and Technology Review, BCR offers news and feature articles aimed at researchers who want to use mathematical and computational methods to answer biological questions.
The inaugural issue includes a list of the top achievements and challenges in computational biology and reports on the goals of each of the first four National Centers for Biomedical Computing that were funded by the NIH last fall: two at Harvard, one at UCLA and one at Stanford.
"With the launch of the national centers, the field of biomedical computing is going through a boom," added Katharine Miller, managing editor of the new magazine. "The publication aims to build a sense of kinship among members of this rapidly expanding research community."
The magazine was slated to be posted online today with print versions to be available later this month.
