VOLUME 1 - ISSUE 1 - A CHANGE OF NAME FOR THE BULLETIN

You may have noticed that we have changed the name of the Bulletin and also that we have begun numbering it: this edition will be Volume 1, Issue 1. There are several reasons for the change. The most important of these is that we have initiated this online journal, which will contain some of the same material as the paper copy that you regularly receive.

However, the most substantial part of the online version will be occupied by the abstracts from our meetings. These will now be published here, and the print-on-paper Proceedings supplement to the British Journal of Pharmacology will be withdrawn after about a year. This will result in a saving to the Society and will make the posting of corrected versions of the abstracts more rapid. They will also be more accessible, as they are currently published only in the print-on-paper supplement and are not available online via Highwire.

In addition to abstracts, the online version will also contain supplementary material that we wish to bring to the attention of the membership from time to time. This may range from images (e.g. photographs taken at meetings) to papers produced by members of the Society on BPS issues and so on. The paper Bulletin which you are used to receiving will continue, and will be an exclusive benefit of membership, but there will be cross references between the two versions, hence the need for a numbering system that will support citation.

Since these changes will affect the content of the current Bulletin we thought it best to start anew, as it were, with a new title and a new indexing arrangement. We chose the name pA2 because this is a distinctively pharmacological term - and also easy to say and to remember. The paper version will be referred to as "pA2 - The Bulletin of the British Pharmacological Society" and the online version will be referred to as "pA2 online". We hope that the new system will work well and bring an increased level of information to your desk as well as speeding up the process of editing and publishing.