MAGMA 30

In the year 1993 a new scientific journal started with an editorial, entitled “a new scientific journal is born”, written by the first members of the editorial board, Axel Haase, PhD and Dieter Matthaei, M.D. (MAGMA, 1993, 1,1)

The name of the new journal “MAGMA” is “Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine” and describes the overall idea for the whole journal to be a forum for all parts of natural sciences and medicine using magnetic resonance technology.

From the year 1993 on MAGMA published a regular stream of volumes with peer-reviewed articles.

Later beginning with the year 1997, MAGMA included each year the abstracts of all annual scientific meetings of the ESMRMB and published on a regular basis, special issues about aspects of magnetic resonance technologies and interesting applications to biology and medicine.

From the beginning, a few questions were still open:

Is it needed to have another journal in magnetic resonance techniques and their applications to biomedical problems?

Will such new journal find partners?

Which scientific focus and regional distribution of authors and readers will this journal have?

With the help from many colleagues, it became clear which direction to take:

In the nineties of the last century the big scientific conferences attracted more and more attendees and companies from all over the world. Authors wanted to publish their work as soon as possible, but this was difficult because of the limited number of journal pages and volumes. MAGMA was an opportunity for authors to get more space for the publication.

The ESMRMB could attract each year more oral presentations with excellent scientific quality. Members of the MR community asked for a forum for publication. After several meetings of the ESMRMB board it became clear that the society needed a publication platform and MAGMA was an ideal partner for this plan. So, MAGMA became the official journal for the ESMRMB in 1997.

Many members of the scientific community were instrumental to get the journal alive:

The emeritus Editors-in-Chief Axel Haase (TU Munich) and Patrick J. Cozzone (SBIC Singapore), the present Editor-in-Chief David G. Norris (Nijmegen), and more than 25 members of the Editorial Board from all over the world and Springer as a well-known and excellent publisher.

I would like to thank all for their help and cooperation for MAGMA.

Axel Haase

Member of the Senior Excellence Faculty of the Technical University of Munich)


Founding editor Magma: 1993–2002.


30 Years, déjà!

30 Years already ! Tempus fugit ! It seems to me that it is only a few years ago that Axel Haase, in his office at the University of Wuerzburg, was asking me to join as an Associate Editor the editorial board of the new journal he was trying to launch! Since then, MAGMA has become the leading MR journal in Europe and has gained international recognition in the global community of magnetic resonance.

This recognition stems from the hard work of the successive editorial teams which have built a reputation of fair review and quick handling of submitted papers. In addition, MAGMA has benefited from the unwavering support of ESMRMB and Springer, now Springer Nature, the journal publisher which has mobilized its resources and networks (consortia) to make MAGMA available globally to the largest possible number of academic institutions and private organizations. In 2021, scientists and clinicians across the world downloaded every single day an average of 366 articles from the MAGMA website, an unquestionable metric which confirms the status of MAGMA as a reference journal in the field of MR methods and applications.

Interestingly, most of the European key opinion leaders in the MR community have supported the journal from the onset and many non-Europeans as well, several becoming active members of the editorial board. One of the early supporters was Sir Peter Mansfield. Out of the last 10 papers that his group published, 3 appeared in MAGMA. The new principles of active acoustic control in gradient coil design were introduced by Mansfield and Haywood in MAGMA. 2000 Jun;10(2):147–51. In 2003, as I was taking over as the new Editor-in-Chief, I was blessed by the concomitant publication of Sir Peter’s paper on controlled E-field gradient coils (MAGMA. 2003 Nov;16(3):113–20) and the announcement of his Nobel award! No Editor-in-Chief would have dreamed of a better advertisement for a journal! In the following years, I had to go through the delicate and painful task of rejecting a paper submitted by a Nobel laureate … Not easy! Sir Peter was a good sport about it and hand-wrote to me that “he enjoyed the hot exchange with the referees and accepted the decision of his younger peers”. Later on, his last paper on model gradient coil employing active acoustic control for MRI was eventually published in MAGMA 2007 Dec;20(5–6):223–31.

As the official journal of the European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology, MAGMA has to attend the needs of the ESMRMB community while maintaining the highest standards of publication. This challenge has been successfully overcome as MAGMA gradually gained a global status among the top MR publications. The success of the Special Issues, often guest-edited by world leaders in the field, is a token of the journal quality. Several of those Special Issues were published on topics not in full fashion yet, and, as a consequence, the citation of the corresponding papers reached a maximum several years after their publication (thus not contributing as much as they could have done to the impact factor!). The first special issue on ‘Highfield MR”, published in March 2008 is a good example. MAGMA editorial teams must be commended for having been good at anticipating hot topics rather than just following the trends. And this applies as well to the Special Issues under preparation.

Most importantly, I see a whole new generation of scientists and clinicians being involved in the journal under the expert guidance and leadership provided by David Norris, be it as authors, reviewers, editorial board members, guest editors … This is extremely good news as they ensure the perennity of MAGMA and its ever increasing global recognition reinforced by its commitment to becoming a fully Open Access journal.


Long live MAGMA!


Patrick J. Cozzone


Centre de Résonance Magnétique Biologique et Médicale (CRMBM),

Faculté de Médecine, Aix-Marseille Université,

Editor: 2003–2017.