A New Branch on a Deep‐Rooted Tree

Good journals are not mere containers into which papers are tipped and stacked. At their best, they are living institutions: nourished by deep roots, steadied by a sound trunk, and renewed by the confidence to put forth new branches. Healthy scholarship depends upon memory and renewal together. That, to our minds, is the right image for the launch of JSR Sleep Biomedicine. The moment is a happy one. Sleep research is in a phase of striking breadth and energy. Data, methods and ideas now move across borders with extraordinary ease. Collaborations form with a natural internationalism that earlier generations could only have hoped for, and the field has acquired a remarkable range of questions and techniques: from molecules to behaviour, from circuits to clinics, from biomarkers and devices to computation and real-world implementation. Growth on this scale eventually asks for new forms. The appearance of JSR Sleep Biomedicine is therefore more than a publishing event. It is a clear recognition of a need the field has already expressed. As a new open-access journal within the Journal of Sleep Research family, JSR Sleep Biomedicine has the chance to become a distinguished home for work across the biology and medicine of sleep, especially studies that are mechanistic, translational, and technically adventurous. We welcome that warmly. A strong journal family gains depth when it can accommodate the true variety of excellent work and give each kind of paper the editorial setting it deserves. Journal of Sleep Research, founded in 1991 and first published in 1992, remains the flagship journal of the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS) and one of the established international forums of the field. Its breadth has always been one of its great strengths. A companion journal extends that strength in a natural way. It allows the flagship to continue in its full range while creating a dedicated space for work whose centre of gravity lies in sleep biomedicine. Such growth feels organic. It comes from living wood. There is a further reason why this new journal feels especially fitting. European scholarship has helped shape modern sleep science for well over a century. Hartmut Schulz has reminded us that sleep became a subject of scientific investigation in the second half of the nineteenth century (Schulz 2022). The modern physiological study of sleep was transformed by Hans Berger's first human EEG recordings in 1924. Michel Jouvet's work on paradoxical sleep brought another decisive advance in the late 1950s. Alexander Borbély's two-process model then gave the field one of its most enduring conceptual frameworks. One could easily enlarge this list. The point is already plain enough. Europe has repeatedly contributed methods, concepts and habits of thought that remain part of the discipline's permanent inheritance. When the European Sleep Research Society was founded in Basel in October 1972, after the earlier discussions in Würzburg, that inheritance acquired an institutional form (Deboer et al. 2022). The founding congress brought together researchers from across Europe and beyond, including countries then divided by the Iron Curtain. It was an impressive beginning, intellectually serious and outward-looking from the start. The Society's purpose was expressed with admirable clarity: to promote research on sleep and related fields, to improve care for patients with sleep disorders, and to support the dissemination of knowledge. Those aims have worn very well. Journal of Sleep Research (JSR) emerged naturally from that culture (Riemann et al. 2024). Under Jim Horne, and under the editors who succeeded him, it became a journal in which the field could recognise something of itself: scientific seriousness, breadth of interest, and a regard for both the laboratory and the clinic. Good journals accumulate something more durable than reputation. Over time, they gather judgement, memory and tone. For more than three decades, JSR has done precisely that. JSR Sleep Biomedicine begins, then, with a strong inheritance behind it, and we hope it will carry that inheritance forward in its own way. Sleep research now spans mechanistic biology, systems physiology, computational modelling, translational medicine, digital phenotyping, wearable technologies, and clinical implementation. A journal devoted to sleep biomedicine can bring such work into a clearer and more coherent view. It can become a place where technically accomplished studies, carefully designed mechanistic papers, translational work that connects levels of explanation, and investigations that refine or consolidate an area of inquiry are read with the attention they deserve. That is an important task. Science advances through discovery, certainly, but also through clarification, refinement, and exact description. A mature field depends upon papers that sharpen methods, establish parameters, test assumptions, replicate key findings, and make the literature more dependable. We would like this journal to be a hospitable place for that kind of work, and to recognise its quiet importance without fanfare. The record of knowledge is built as much by care as by brilliance. Our editorial ambitions are therefore straightforward. We hope manuscripts will be read first for the quality of the question, the soundness of the method, the honesty of the analysis, the proportion of the claims, and the clarity of the writing. Those are old virtues. They remain the sine qua non of scientific publishing worth trusting. Around them, a journal can build a character that authors value and readers recognise. The same spirit should shape peer review. The best reviewing is exacting, constructive and calm. It strengthens a paper, tests its reasoning, checks its claims and helps the work say as clearly as possible what it can truly support. It asks for seriousness from authors and reviewers alike. We would like JSR Sleep Biomedicine to foster that kind of exchange: critical, fair-minded and genuinely useful. A journal gains distinction when its editorial process improves the literature and leaves authors feeling that their work has been read with care. Because the journal is international from the outset, we are equally keen that it should welcome good work wherever it originates. Sleep science now flourishes in celebrated centres and in younger laboratories, in large collaborative networks and in smaller groups doing careful and imaginative work. The journal will be strongest if it reads across that whole landscape with attentiveness and consistency. Scientific quality is widely distributed; editorial fairness should be likewise. There is one further aspiration we would place gently on record. Fields that move quickly can lose sight of their own genealogy. Sleep research is now richly furnished with genetics, imaging, large-scale physiology, modelling, wearables and digital approaches of many kinds. This is a source of real excitement. Yet a mature discipline also returns, from time to time, ad fontes. It remembers where its central ideas came from, which questions have been asked before, and which elegant observations remain quietly fertile in the literature. We would be delighted, in due course, if the journal also became a place for the occasional historical or conceptual essay that reconnects current work with the deeper lineage of sleep and circadian science. Such memory is not ornamental. It nourishes judgment. This would sit very naturally within the larger work of the ESRS (Deboer et al. 2022). Over the decades the Society has helped build the field's wider architecture through congresses, guidelines, accredited centres, certification pathways, examinations and major educational resources, including its textbook of sleep medicine. That long institutional labour matters greatly. Disciplines become robust when discovery is joined to teaching, standard-setting and dissemination. Journals have an honoured place in that ecology. They help to shape a field's habits of evidence, tone and ambition. The open-access model for JSR Sleep Biomedicine seems especially apt in that context. Work in sleep biomedicine now speaks to nearly every scale of inquiry, from molecules to behaviour, from childhood to ageing, from mental health to cardiometabolic disease. Research with such reach should circulate freely among those who can read it, test it, challenge it and build upon it. Open access suits the breadth of the field and the speed with which it now moves. So we welcome JSR Sleep Biomedicine with confidence and pleasure. We hope it will be rigorous, generous and intellectually poised; a journal with room for methodological ingenuity, translational intelligence and technically accomplished work; a journal that values precision, proportion and lucidity; a journal that helps excellent papers find their natural readers. The best journals do more than select manuscripts. They give a field a place in which to think clearly about itself. A deep-rooted and an established tree puts forth a new branch because it is alive. That is how we see JSR Sleep Biomedicine in relation to the Journal of Sleep Research and to the European Sleep Research Society that stands behind them both. The roots are deep, nurturing and wide-reaching, the trunk well tested, and the new growth is welcome. We are very glad to see it begin, and we will do our best to help it grow with strength, range and grace. Ivana Rosenzweig and William Wisden contributed equally to this work. Both authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript. The authors have nothing to report. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.