Fight Aging!

I just added to the Fight Aging! Resources page a small number of links to journals and other scientific archives that I graze from time to time. I left out the broad life science journals that sometimes touch on aging in favor of searchable archives and publications dedicated to aging and longevity science. I also tend to favor open-access journals as the resulting material gives me more to read and more to write about. I'd be a pauper if I acquiesced to paywall demands for everything I find interesting enough to want to read, but fortunately paywalls are not the future of scientific publishing. The smaller the hurdle to propagation of scientific knowledge, the more the scientific community will benefit, as the propagation of that knowledge is a very important part of generating support for funding and development of clinical applications.

If you have suggestions for a few other journals or resources that follow the general theme of those already there, let me know.

This minor site update was spurred by my noticing that research blog Ouroboros briefly roused from its slumber to speak about Pathobioliogy of Aging & Age-related Diseases, a new open access journal on aging that launched earlier this year. Its remit looks promising for those of us interested in aging as accumulated molecular damage, and the development of means to repair that damage.

The pursuit of investigations into the science of aging is really designed to understand why cellular processes begin to fail with advancing age, and what molecular events contribute to this failure. In this regard, the distinction between aging and the diseases associated with aging becomes less clear, and they are most likely driven by the same or similar events related to biological decline.

With the launch of Pathobiology of Aging & Age-related Diseases, we hope to enlighten the scientific community by recognizing outstanding pathobiology-based scientific contributions, allowing scientists to communicate data that might be of less interest in other journals more focused on generic aging or specific scientific disciplines. Aging is indeed an 'old' problem and is being studied in a variety of ways that use mammalian model systems to identify mechanistic pathways that can be targeted to maintain healthy living. In this regard, we are providing a 'new' venue for disseminating information that specifically focuses on the pathobiological aspects of aging and the chronic diseases directly associated with aging.

Hopefully this will provide a source of interesting material in the years ahead. A good way for laypeople to learn more about the field of aging and longevity science is to browse the open access journals on a regular basis. If you skip over what is hard and read what isn't, then sooner or later you'll find that less and less of the content is beyond you, and that you understand far more than you used to. I see that process as one of the compelling arguments for destroying the old paywall model of scientific publication: how can laypeople casually increase their knowledge when everything is locked away beyond the impulse decision to spend a little time reading?