With great pleasure we welcome you to the first issue of the Journal of Life Sciences (JoLS), a postdoc community initiative. With the generation of this new journal, JoLS has set two major goals. First, the publication of professional peer-reviewed open access international journal within life science. Second, to support the post-doc community by providing an opportunity in gaining experience in reviewing and editing manuscripts and highlighting their research and activities.
JoLS has a wide thematic scope of life science including all sub-disciplines, such as biochemistry, biology, ecology, genetics, immunology, microbiology, neuroscience, physiology, zoology and many other areas, with the overall goal towards improving the quality and standard of life. The journal accepts original research papers, reviews, perspectives, commentaries, progress articles, methodologies as well as research highlights. To establish immediate visibility of your research, all articles accepted for publication will be posted on the journal website prior to publication.
JoLS is the first ever scientific journal to be exclusively run and managed by postdocs. The Postdoc community is the largest research community in the world and postdocs have usually accrued years of research experience and hence warrant a respectable place within their scientific field. However, postdocs don’t receive any formal training to succeed in academia. JoLS provides postdocs with an opportunity to gain experience in reviewing and editing manuscripts usually only offered to senior scientists. All review activities are acknowledged, recognized and visible to the research community.
In this issue of JoLS, we highlight the recent advances in HIV cure, review the lessons learned from HIV elite controllers, how Capsid-CPSF6 interaction regulates HIV positioning and integration and review immunotherapy for hematological malignancies.
While JoLS contributes to the training of postdocs, we also highlight their research and the many other aspects of postdoc life. Postdoctoral research will be highlighted in ‘Mentor - Postdoc Spotlights’. These spotlights highlight their research with a biography of the postdoc and his/her mentor. In this issue we’ve put 2 post-docs and their mentors in the spotlight for their research. Besides research, postdocs support other activities such as supervising students, teaching classes and writing grant applications, while possibly starting or supporting a family and planning your future career in academia, industry, teaching or another field. In every issue of JoLS a different aspect of postdoc life will be highlighted in support of the postdoc community, termed ‘Postdoc Life’. In this issue of JoLS we provide an invited editorial that describes how daily habits can help you deal with stress.
On the occasion of the launch of this first issue of JoLS, we would like to express our gratitude to the advisory board and editorial board members for their sustained support to make the launch of this new journal possible. We hope that you enjoy the first issue of JoLS and join us in this exciting venture as we strive to promote and support open access publications and postdoctoral education & research.