A New Place to Send Your Wild Ideas

Have an unpublished manuscript about the nature of navel fluff or a possible cure for death lying around? Now, there's a new journal where you can submit your ground-breaking, thought-provoking, or even wacky hypotheses. Hypotheses in the Life Sciences (HyLS), to be published by the University of Buckingham Press starting in September, has just been founded by a group of people previously involved in the controversial journal Medical Hypotheses. It's not just a direct competitor to that journal, the group members say. Instead, they argue, it's a replacement for a different journal that Elsevier, the publisher of Medical Hypotheses, recently killed.

HyLS 's editor is William Bains, a molecular biologist and entrepreneur with a part-time position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bains sat on the Editorial Advisory Board of Medical Hypotheses but left in May to protest the sacking of his friend Bruce Charlton, the journal's editor, who had published a paper denying the link between HIV and AIDS.

In 2008 and 2009, however, Bains himself edited Bioscience Hypotheses, a journal with a similar mission but a much broader scope. At the time, Medical Hypotheses had to reject so many papers that there was room for a spinoff, says Charlton. But Elsevier closed down the journal in late 2009 because it wasn't profitable.

Bains, however, felt the journal had a future. He says he tried to buy the title 'Biomedical Hypothesis' from Elsevier but that the company wasn't interested in selling. So, he set up HyLS instead.