Development: a journal's journey

Imagine you study the embryo in the late 1940s. There's peace following the Second World War and developmental biologists are entering a prosperous phase with new techniques and approaches. Furthermore, with the establishment of groups such as the London Embryologists' Club in 1948, new communities of like-minded researchers are forming. Now imagine you've got an interesting story to communicate with the rest of the field. Where would you publish it?

With the thousands of journals available today, it is difficult to conceive that many familiar names did not exist in the 1940s. Genes and Development (est. 1987), Developmental Biology (est. 1959) and even Cell (est. 1974), with its brood of spin-off titles, would not appear until decades later. It is not surprising that embryologists of the period needed a journal of common interest to consolidate their studies, which was not fulfilled by the existing repertoire of periodicals. The idea to create a new international journal based in Europe for embryology and morphology was met with both enthusiasm and determination (Newth, 1953, 1979; Alfred and Smith, 2008).

The task of launching the journal was initially taken on by Dutch embryologist Martinus Woerdeman but was abandoned for want of finding a publisher. In 1950, the launch of Embryologia (now Development, Growth and Differentiation) by the Japanese Society of Developmental Biologists motivated a group of mostly British embryologists to take on the challenge once more. The following year, the movement led by Michael Abercrombie and David Newth (Fig. 1) recruited Woerderman alongside many prominent academics of the era, such as Honor Fell, Peter Medawar and Conrad Waddington (of ‘Waddington landscape’ fame; Waddington, 1957) to sponsor a proposal for a new journal (Dalcq, 1953; Medawar, 1980).

The group endured ‘several abortive efforts’ to secure a publisher, although we cannot determine what these were (Newth, 1979). These failed attempts likely encouraged the team to seek more patronage for their cause because, when they approached The Company of Biologists in May 1952, their proposal was accompanied by a letter of support from one of its Board members, James Danielli (famous for his work on the lipid membrane), and a generous guarantee from the Wellcome Trust of £2000 (equivalent to over £72,000 today) to back the journal financially in its tumultuous initial years. Although the exact details of the proposal are lost, the pitch must have been convincing because The Company of Biologists accepted the offer and agreed to launch a new journal for the first time (Bray et al., 2025). The new Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology (JEEM) was born. The journal's sponsors were appointed to the Editorial Board and Abercrombie was installed as Editor (Dalcq, 1953).

The launch of JEEM was first announced in Nature in February 1953 (Newth, 1953), when it was described to have two aims: to encourage international exchange of knowledge and opinions, and to provide a forum for researchers interested in animal developmental processes at any stage of life, a topic that continues today (see our 2025 special issue on lifelong development). JEEM's first issue was published the following month (Fig. 2A), containing a foreword by Albert Dalcq and six papers discussing development, regeneration and in vitro culture techniques. For a more detailed look at this first issue, and how it compares to later editions, please see the companion post on the Node: First issues – publishing developmental biology through the decades.

From the outset, JEEM pushed publishing boundaries by, for example, accommodating multilingual issues and summary translations. Soon after launch, JEEM held biennial scientific conferences concomitant with the annual Editorial Board meeting (Slack, 2000), beginning in 1953 with sponsorship from the British Council and continuing until at least the early 1980s (Gaze et al., 1981; Alfred and Smith, 2008). JEEM also made an extraordinary move by providing free colour figures long before other journals (Wylie, 2012) – something that some still do not offer.

Abercrombie served as the sole Editor of JEEM until 1962 when he was succeeded by Newth. From 1970, the journal was run by three to four Editors, including Peter Lawrence (to date, our longest-standing Editor, having worked with the journal for a remarkable 33 years), Lewis Wolpert and Anne McLaren. In 1978, The Company of Biologists started supporting the modern iteration of the London Embryologists' Club: the British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB). This will be the topic of another article coming soon, but it is important to mention now that JEEM published supplementary issues of papers presented at the BSDB symposia from 1984; this venture was integral to JEEM's transformation into the journal we know today.

Newth's epigraph describes how new journals are occasionally required but also illustrates that existing journals can be modified to fit the changing needs of the community. JEEM exemplifies both these principles: first established to fill an important gap in the publication landscape, JEEM also underwent significant alteration to accommodate growth and change in developmental biology.

The relaunch of JEEM as Development can be – pretty much exclusively – attributed to Chris Wylie, one of the pioneers of Xenopus developmental biology. In the mid-1980s, while Wylie was the Publications Officer at the BSDB and a Director of The Company of Biologists, he argued that the BSDB symposium supplements were often more interesting than regular issues of the journal. Wylie set out to create a new publication that he envisioned would be the BSDB's society journal and which he had already named ‘Development’. Wylie writes that ‘a brief TV comedy series could be written about the subsequent discussions with publishers’ regarding this idea (Wylie, 2012); however, several publishers did express interest in the proposal (Grewal, 2014).

Meanwhile, Wylie was having parallel discussions at the Company about how to revamp their ‘dusty image’ and make JEEM more competitive for molecular research. Alongside an emphasis on reducing publication times and attracting more research from the USA, the Company considered changing the journal's name, scope and design to make it more appealing. In 1986, they boldly decided to relaunch JEEM – voting 10:1 to rename it Development as Wylie had imagined – all in less than a year (Wylie, 2012). More on this decision will be published in another article later this year.

So, in January 1987, the first issue of Development was published with a glossy new cover (Fig. 2B), two new US Editors and Wylie as Editor-in-Chief. Wylie remained at the helm of Development for 16 years, during which he steered the journal through the digital revolution, navigating the transition from chaotic paper-based peer review to floppy discs, fax, CD-ROMs, email and the first website (Wylie, 2002). Wylie also oversaw the introduction of Travelling Fellowships from Development, funded by The Company of Biologists (and which you can learn more about in a subsequent article), and took on the gargantuan task of publishing the infamous ‘zebrafish issue’ in 1996, working closely with the labs involved and the Company's Production team (Wylie, 2002; Nüsslein-Volhard, 2012; Mullins et al., 2021).

In 2003, the role of Editor-in-Chief was taken up by fellow Xenopus biologist Jim Smith. As a Director of The Company of Biologists, Smith had been involved in Wylie's appointment and even contributed the first cover of Development (Smith, 1987, 2012) (Fig. 2B). Although Wylie had overseen some steps towards the digitisation of the journal, it was really Smith who shepherded Development into the 21st century by creating an in-house team (Box 1) that supported the transitions to an online manuscript submission system, online publication of the journal's issues, digitisation of the archive in the form of PDF scans, and the first Open Access (OA) policies (Alfred and Smith, 2008).

Like the publishing industry, developmental biology was rapidly changing, with fields such as systems biology, genomics and stem cells gaining traction (Smith, 2009). One of Smith's first acts as Editor-in-Chief was to instigate the ‘Development and disease’ section of the journal to underscore the medical relevance of the field and, before leaving Development at the end of 2009, Smith had already signalled the journal's interest in stem cell research by appointing new stem cell Editors. However, it was Smith's successor, Olivier Pourquié (Harvard University, USA), known for his research on the vertebrate segmentation clock, whose main ambition was to expand the journal into this emerging area (Pourquié, 2012). Pourquié added additional stem cell expertise to Development's team by appointing both new Editors and a dedicated in-house Reviews Editor, as well as releasing the journal's first special issue on stem cells and regeneration (Pourquié et al., 2013, 2018) and replacing the ‘Development and disease’ section of the journal with a new dedicated section on stem cells (Pourquié, 2012). Similarly, Pourquié's team was also quick to act to attract papers from the growing field of human development. In addition to introducing a dedicated ‘Human development’ journal section and a special issue on the topic, Pourquié resurrected the journal's early tradition of organising scientific conferences with the launch of the ‘From Stem Cells to Human Development’ meeting series in 2014 (Pourquié and Brown, 2018) – more on this story will be published later in the year.

Beyond the science, Pourquié made major contributions during his eight-year tenure in emphasising that Development is a community journal with the launch of the Node (Box 2) (Amsen et al., 2010) – the first community site of its kind from The Company of Biologists. Pourquié also began journeying through an unprecedented level of change in the publishing ecosystem. Development quickly adopted a preprint-positive stance in 2014 with the growing popularity of bioRxiv, implementing co-submission options the following year. In addition, the journal took opportunities to make publishing more positive for authors, for example by introducing an article type for techniques and resources articles, format-free initial submission, cross-referee commenting and a continuous publication model to reduce the time and pain of publishing (Pourquié, 2018).

Development's current Editor-in-Chief, James Briscoe (The Francis Crick Institute, UK), perhaps most well-recognised for his work on spinal cord patterning, was appointed in 2018 and inherited similar challenges as his predecessors: encompassing a flourishing field, focusing on the community and navigating change in publishing (Briscoe, 2018). To grow with the field, in addition to signalling topics of interest with annual special issues (Briscoe and Brown, 2019), Briscoe and his in-house team appointed Associate Editors with expertise in the peripheral and emerging areas of developmental and stem cell biology, such as computational modelling of development, metabolism and single-cell biology (Briscoe and Brown, 2020b). The community is growing, too, and so Development must serve this larger audience; the introduction of the Node Network (Box 2), ‘Transitions in development’ interviews, the Outstanding Paper Prize (Briscoe et al., 2023), and the Pathway to Independence programme (Briscoe and Brown, 2022) are some recent steps to promote researchers at different stages of their career.

A trickier challenge is to evolve with the changing demands of authors, readers and funders. OA publication has been gaining momentum since the journal first implemented policies over 20 years ago. The journal was one of the first to be granted Transformative Journal status in 2021 to become Plan S compliant. It is important that authors can publish with us regardless of funding policy, geographical location or financial position. It remains free to publish in Development and The Company of Biologists' Read & Publish agreements mean that many researchers can publish OA without paying an article processing charge. Development continues to support the popularity of preprints, now publishing ‘In preprints’ articles in the journal to signal interesting preprints in the expanse of preprints posted daily, as well as pushing progress in transparency and efficiency in peer review through interesting initiatives (see Briscoe and Brown, 2024 for a recent summary).

Alongside progress, some fundamental pillars remain constant. Development has always published manuscripts on regeneration in vitro systems and development, including early studies of human development (e.g. O'Rahilly et al., 1956). Manuscripts continue to be handled by expert academics, the journal is still published by a not-for-profit publisher that gives back to the community and our articles are consistently viewed as quality and stand the test of time. Development remains a respected journal in our field, having been named one of the 100 most influential life science journals by the Special Libraries Association in 2009.

The scientific publishing landscape and The Company of Biologists both continue to evolve rapidly. Over the next few years, we can expect continued change in the business models supporting scientific publishing, whether this is in new forms of OA or further innovation in publishing pathways. We are committed to being as inclusive as possible and giving all authors, wherever you are in the world, options that allow you to publish in Development. Preprints present new ways to enhance scientific communication and new approaches to peer review, and we will continue to develop new ways to help researchers navigate and use the preprint literature effectively. Over the next few years, we also expect to see innovative use of artificial intelligence in scientific publishing, complementing human experts. These technologies are emerging as valuable tools for information and literature discovery, manuscript processing, and journal production, offering possibilities to improve scientific publishing while maintaining rigorous standards.

Development approaches these changes from a position of strength, building on our established foundation as a community-focused journal that embraces innovation. Our scope continues to expand into crucial emerging areas, while maintaining our fundamental focus on developmental processes. We remain dedicated to supporting early-career researchers, advancing open science practices, and serving the developmental biology community. The journal's continued success relies on support from our community – from you. Please read and cite each other's work and participate in shaping the future of the field through peer review, submitting your papers to us and authoring review-type articles, which we acknowledge by preserving or planting a tree in your name in The Forest of Biologists (Moulton and Freeman, 2023). As The Company of Biologists enters its second century, Development stands ready to adapt and grow alongside the field it serves, just as it has done throughout its 72-year history.

I thank my colleagues at The Company of Biologists for providing resources for, and feedback on, this Editorial, and James Briscoe for discussion about the future of Development.