Dear Readers,

Welcome to the ‘new and improved’ Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics (CBBI). I am honored to take over as the Editor-in-Chief officially starting January 1, 2016, although I have already had about 6 months experience as Advisory Editor in 2015. As you will note, we have a distinguished list of editorial board members, each experts in their respective fields, who are energetic and highly respected in the international scientific arena.

As you know, the publishing world is experiencing difficulties with the peer-review process [http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202 and http://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/top-10-most-highly-cited-retracted-papers/and http://retractionwatch.com/?s=fake+peer+review]. Consequently, we are doing everything possible to strive to improve the quality of the journal with consistent peer-review procedures to ensure the integrity of the articles accepted. For example, all submitted manuscripts are initially run through plagiarism software. This and other aspects of our improved peer reviewer process promises to improve the overall quality of reviewing and decision-making.

As to the Journal’s content, we are happy to entertain not only original research papers and reviews, but also mini-reviews, letters to the editor, hypothesis/opinion papers and occasionally special issues from important symposia in the field. We expect two such ‘meeting proceedings’ to appear in 2016 that will contain original research papers, reviews and mini- reviews on the special topics of that issue.

We have also tightened and streamlined our scope as the field of cell biochemistry and biophysics is obviously quite broad. In particular, we will not accept papers that relate to human clinical (medical) research as well as the areas of plant biology and biochemistry as these are the purview of several other journals. Please have a look at our aims and scope on our website and feel free to offer any comments or suggestions.

Overall, we hope to provide you with a top-rated journal containing first class papers in the field that have been carefully and critically peer-reviewed. For this accomplishment, we are particularly, and always, indebted to our reviewers and Editorial Board, without which any journal would never succeed.

We welcome your suggestions and input at any time and sincerely hope that you will continue to consider CBBI as an outlet for the publication of your research. I am sincerely appreciative of your readership and interest and look forward to both your contributions and willingness to serve as a CBBI reviewer in the future.

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