Cell Stress Society International
President's Report - 1999
Following the organizational meeting at Cold Spring Harbor in May of 1998, Peter Csermely and I, serving as acting Secretary/Treasurer and President respectively, put together an organizing committee, obtained nominations for a slate of officers and councilors, prepared a draft by-laws and a membership brochure. Peter took the lead on assemblying, printing and arranging for the distribution of the brochure, ballots and envelops. The first Council of the Society was elected and the by-laws adopted by November, with David Smith serving as independent teller of the election. Churchill Livingstone mailed out over 8,000 packets for us that contained this material and information on Cell Stress & Chaperones journal. Peter also arranged for the membership pins and Society medallions, both of which have received numerous compliments on their designs.
I set up a Society web site which was later linked by the publisher to a central access homepage for both the Society and the journal with the URL www.cellstress.com. I took two additional steps to secure the Society as a legal entity. I incorporated the Society in the state of Connecticut as a nonprofit corporation and I applied to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, which was subsequently granted. As the membership applications began to arrive, we used some of Helen Neumann's time in the editorial office to assemble the list of members and transfer the list of new journal subscribers to Churchill Livingstone. Currently the Society has about 250 members in 38 countries. The elected officers began their terms on January 1, 1999.
The Society is completing its first year of service to the scientific community. Through financial support from our members and founding corporate sponsors, the Society has given a total of 12 student poster awards at a Gordon Conference on plant temperature stress and at two Keystone Symposia on molecular chaperones and protein biogenesis. We have contributed to the Bat-Sheva Seminar in Israel on Gene Regulation during Stress and to the Bageco-6 Meeting in Italy. CSSI is also a sponsor of the Second International Workshop on Molecular Biology of Stress Responses, held at Wuhan, PR China, and of the First Internet Conference on Stress (www.stress-conference.com).
The Society adopted Cell Stress & Chaperones as its official journal, beginning with the March, 1999 issue. During the summer, I as Editor-in-Chief was informed that Churchill Livingstone had decided to end publication of the journal with the December issue for financial reasons. I asked the Society Council if they would support transfer of ownership of the journal to the Society and they agreed unanimously. An extended negotiation then began with the publisher over the terms of transfer of ownership. Verbal agreement has been reached between the publisher and the Society to transfer ownership of the entire journal, including electronic rights, to the Society. Based on this verbal agreement, I arranged with Allen Press to begin work on the January 2000 issue. Our initial interactions with the people at Allen Press have been excellent. I am particularly pleased with the interest that the Director of Development for Allen Press, Dr. Robert Kidd, has shown in the future of the journal. With the encouragement of Dr. Kidd, we have submitted our application to the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) to be a member organization of this more than 50 member institute. There are a number of good reasons for CSSI to be a member, but a very immediate benefit is that CSSI becomes eligible to join the BioOne electronic journal platform and database under development for AIBS members. This will replace our current platform in the Academic Press Ideal database. The Society is also eligible to join the PubMedCentral electronic database supported by the U.S. NIH.
I think that our Society is off to an excellent start. Two clear goals for the year 2000 are to increase our membership base and to stabilize financially Cell Stress & Chaperones. I wish to thank our Council, Barbara Polla, Peter Csermely, Robert Tanguay and Takashi Yura for their excellent advice, support and contributions to the first year of our new Society.
Collegially,
Lawrence E. Hightower
President, CSSI