In 1948, twenty scientists gathered at the Seoul National University to have the first annual meeting of the Korean Biochemical Society. Korea had been freed from the colonial rule of Japan three years before, and the Korean War broke out two years later, lasting for another three years. It was a time of deprivation and destruction. Many scientists were lost during the war, research facilities destroyed and research funds were unavailable. During that period, however, scientific endeavor continued, and the Society started publication of the Korean Journal of Biochemistry in 1964, which became the first Korean scientific journal to publish only papers written in English. It was the belief of the editors of the Journal that only papers that were exposed to a worldwide readership could make any contribution to the progress in the field. This belief, so natural in current times, was not so readily accepted by the Korean potential authors of that time, because of both the language barrier and the lower quality of research.

Experimental & Molecular Medicine (EMM) was launched in 1996 as a successor of the Korean Journal of Biochemistry with a drastic overhaul of its scope and aims. After continued discussion between the editors and the organizing committee of the Society, a conclusion was drawn that the Society needed a journal that was more oriented toward the molecular aspects of medical problems rather than basic biochemistry and molecular biology in general. To emphasize the new scope, a scanning electron micrograph of human chromosomes was presented on the cover, and the editors attempted to select only those papers that fit the new scope of EMM. Happily, the new EMM caught the attention of many researchers in the field of biology and medicine in Korea and abroad, and they eagerly submitted their papers to EMM. Soon, the journal was listed in the international indexing services like PubMed, EMbase, Scopus and Science Citation Index (SCI). The advent of the internet has undoubtedly helped the global exposure of journals like EMM, whose scopes cover a much more focused area within science.

The recent expansion of scientific research in Korea and China has also aided in the steady growth of EMM. During the period between 2001 and 2010, the number of papers written by Korean scientists that were listed in the Institute of Science Index products (SCI, SCIE, SSCI, A&HCI) increased from 15 895 to 39 843, with an average increase of 11.2% each year.1 During the same period, Chinese science showed a more pronounced growth; the number of Chinese-authored papers quadrupled from 34 270 in 2001 to 135 375 in 2010, with an average increase of 16.8% every year.1 This increase in the number and quality of research papers in both countries has inevitably resulted in the consequential enhancement in the number and quality of papers submitted to EMM.

Since EMM’s launch in 1996, the landscape of biomedical research has been in constant change. What was constituted as a science fiction story of yesteryear, such as stem cells and tissue regeneration, is becoming a reality in the present day. In this critical period, the Society has decided to make another shift in the overall aims and scope of EMM as it commences publication of EMM in cooperation with Nature Publishing Group (NPG). The new aims of EMM will focus on papers dealing with the clinical benefit of experimental and translational research performed using molecular tools. Thus, the journal will now put more emphasis on the physiological or pathological meaning of the experiments. In this sense, in vivo experiments that deal with specific diseases will be regarded favorably. We describe eight particular areas of interest in the scope for the new EMM, which we believe cover most of the major medical problems we currently face: cancer biology, immunology, neuroscience, cardiovascular biology, metabolic diseases, genetics and genomics, gene therapy and stem cells/regenerative medicine. In addition, the online manuscript submission and transfer system constructed by experts in NPG should allow an easier manuscript submission for authors and a rapid processing of submitted papers for peer review and assessment. We also expect that the language editing assistance provided by NPG will enable papers to be more readable and polished to the satisfaction of authors as well as readers. The Open Access availability of all papers along with their worldwide exposure, through being hosted on the nature.com platform, should encourage and enable readers to easily search for and access the papers that are of interest to them for both their research as well as their personal growth. These efforts make EMM a new platform for research communication among not only the East pacific countries, such as Korea, China, Japan and Australia, but now also the world. The belief of early editors of the Korean Journal of Biochemistry that stressed the importance of worldwide exposure of research papers is now validated in the new EMM.