BioMed: Let’s Bring Together What Belongs Together

When I was contacted by MDPI to serve as inaugurating Editor-in-Chief, I was skeptical because I recalled my spam-packed email inbox that is flooded daily by introductions of new journals with groovy names praising their highest scientific objectives and goals. Having this in mind, MDPI, the new editorial office, the editorial board and myself worked for something missing for clinical and basic scientists around the world. Notably, since the Constitutiones Regni Siciliae in 1231 under Emperor Frederick II, practicing, teaching and researching medicine became separated from that of pharmaceutical and biological science. Ever since, medicine developed in parallel to biological science, as still reflected in our current universities’ structures, with the Schools of Medicine and Schools of Life/Natural Science. While such separation clearly makes sense in terms of teaching and practicing, one might wonder why research also needed to follow this path, as if humans would not belong to nature/life. However, since the days of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, the last polymath [1], it became impossible for one human to be an expert in the constantly expanding knowledge of medicine and life/natural sciences. Hence, due to the explosion of knowledge during the last 150 years, further sub-specializations in medicine and natural science have been formed.

While sub-specialization is needed to develop medical and natural practicing, teaching and researching further, as an author of a human medicine-/biology-oriented submission, one often faces the requirements that the publications should comprise all possible aspects of human medicine and biological science, from brain MR to metabolomic, genetics, physiology and molecular biology to cell and structural biology, in one manuscript. Without doubt, although such work would certainly provide an exciting plenty of information, the individual scientist often fails to elaborate upon such broadly elaborated work and publish more focused work that per se may not be of lesser quality in the given field of specialization. Accordingly, often, researchers face the challenge to have elaborated high-quality and exciting findings in their own field of expertise—either in clinical or basic science—while lacking the possibilities to expand their work to either animal models or clinical validation, or highly sophisticated molecular science approaches. However, such high-quality work might inspire others to complement the study, thus completing the work to potentially provide outstanding scientific contributions.

Thus, we came up with BioMed [2] as unique platform for excellent (i) medicine-oriented biological science of those the results await in vivo approval and high-quality (ii) clinically relevant research with unresolved in vitro issues. BioMed welcomes submissions from all areas of human-relevant life science that are of high quality in the topic it belongs to, but may lack the further approval from other disciplines. At best, the work should point to the potential importance of the present findings for human medicine/biology that possibly serves as an inspiration for others to complement this study by other high-quality research in a complementary field. By this, BioMed should not only be a journal publishing important and superb individual work, but also serve as a platform for inspiration, contacting and introducing collaboration to further develop and expand novel individual findings for thrilling landmark stories—just in our spirit of “bring together what belongs together”!

It is my privilege to announce that BioMed is open now for submissions! Authors should expect a fair but strictly quality-focused peer-review process that seeks for excellent quality in the given fields of the authors and the spirit and innovation for a high impact to human/biological science. Here, we can all work together to shape this journal into something special, that is made up by its authors and readers and their will to communicate and collaborate.