A decade ago, Dr. Li Yu’s laboratory at Tsinghua University described a new organelle: the migrasome, a vesicular structure left behind on the retraction fibres of migrating cells. What began as a curiosity has become one of cell biology’s fastest-growing fields, with hundreds of laboratories now working on migrasome biology across development, immunology, cancer and clinical diagnostics. This year the field gains its own dedicated journal, Vita Migrasome, with Yu as founding Editor-in-Chief. We spoke to him about why a young field needs its own home, what he will and won’t compromise on as an editor, and where he expects both the journal and the science to be five years from now.
In our first issue — “Open access didn’t fail. The invoice arrived.” — we argued that while the West debates who pays for open access, the initiative has quietly shifted east, and we named Vita among the new, author-fee-free journals (at least in an initial phase) now being built in China. This issue puts a voice to that shift: the scientist behind one of those journals, in his own words.
The migrasome field is barely ten years old and already has a journal of its own. What is the mission of Vita Migrasome, and what gap does it fill that the existing journals do not?
The model I have in mind is Autophagy. When Dan Klionsky started that journal, autophagy was not yet the field it is today — it became one, and the journal was part of how that happened. A dedicated journal does something a general-interest journal cannot: it gives a field a centre of gravity. It sets standards, it builds a shared vocabulary, and it tells everyone working in the area, from the student running her first migration assay to the clinician measuring migrasomes in urine, that there is a place where this work belongs and will be taken seriously.
So the mission is twofold. First, to promote the field: to be the venue that convenes migrasome biology and helps it mature. Second, and I want to be very clear about this, to do so at the highest standard of quality. My benchmark is Nature Cell Biology. I am not interested in building a journal that publishes migrasome work because no one else will; I am interested in building one that the best migrasome labs choose because it is the right home. Those two goals, promoting a young field and holding a demanding bar, are usually in tension. Reconciling them is the whole point of the exercise.
Why launch now? What is it about this particular moment that makes it the right time?
Because the field has reached the scale where it needs infrastructure. Let me give you the numbers, because they surprised even me. More than 120 groups across at least 12 countries have now published original migrasome research [these figures come from a PubMed search for “migrasome” and include all article types, not only research papers — Ed.]. If you count the laboratories that have requested reagents, sought collaborations, or applied for migrasome-related funding, we are approaching 250 labs actively engaged with this novel organelle. This is no longer a topic pursued by one group in Beijing and a handful of friends. It is an international community.
There is also a wider moment in scientific publishing that makes this the right time. For a generation, the assumption in China, and in much of the world, was that your best work went abroad, to a small number of Western journals, and that a serious new journal could only be built in London or New York or Boston. That assumption is being tested right now. China is investing very deliberately in its own high-quality, English-language journals and in the infrastructure to support them, and to build them on terms that authors can actually afford. Vita Migrasome is part of that shift. A field that was, in large part, born here should be able to have its flagship journal here too, open to the whole world, but no longer waiting for the big established journals to let us in.
Migrasome biology is only a decade old. What is your answer to the sceptic who says the field is simply too young to sustain its own journal?
I would answer with the growth curve. Last year there were around 97 papers with “migrasome” in them (all article types). This year, and we are only halfway through, there are already 94. The field is not plateauing; it is accelerating. And because it is young, almost everything is still open. Whole categories of question such as how migrasome biogenesis is spatiotemporally controlled, how cargo is selected, what migrasomes do in the immune system, how they behave in vivo in disease, are barely touched. There is a great deal of low-hanging fruit, and that is exactly the condition under which a journal earns its place: not by rationing a mature, slow-moving literature, but by giving a fast-moving one somewhere to converge.
A young field is a reason to build the journal now, not a reason to wait. If you wait until a field is established, you have missed the moment when a journal can actually shape it.
You discovered the migrasome, and you now edit its journal. That is an unusual concentration of authority. How will you make sure Vita Migrasome serves the whole field, rather than any one group or institution — including your own?
This is the question I take most seriously, and I want to answer it with commitments rather than reassurances.
First: I will send my own best work to this journal. I will not keep our strongest papers for other titles and use Vita Migrasome for the rest. A journal whose own Editor-in-Chief does not trust it with his best science has no standing to ask anyone else to. And when I submit, I will accept the editorial decision without appeal, exactly as I do at every other journal I submit to. If the reviewers say no, the answer is no. I do not want, and will not accept, a special channel for my own laboratory.
Second: my ambition here is not for my group. It is to make migrasome biology an internationally respected field. That is a goal you cannot reach by favouritism, because a field that is seen to reward one lab is not respected, it is discounted. The only way this journal succeeds is if a young PI in Chengdu or Oslo or Tel Aviv believes their paper will be judged on its merits. Protecting that belief is my main job as Editor-in-Chief.
A single-field journal always risks becoming insular — a room where the same people talk to each other. How will you keep Vita Migrasome connected to the wider cell-biology and clinical communities?
Here the biology helps me, because the migrasome refuses to stay in one field. I sometimes say that “migrasome” is the wrong name; it is too narrow for what we have found. We now know that essentially every cell type can generate migrasomes under the right conditions, and that they appear across the physiological processes we have looked at, and across disease. They are turning out to be a structure that connects fields rather than one that sits in a corner of cell biology.
Let me give concrete examples. We have just had a paper accepted at Nature Immunology showing that migrasomes from triple-negative breast cancer cells can leak tumour antigen and activate the immune system; that is cancer biology, immunology and vesicle biology in a single story. We currently have four further papers under submission on autoimmune disease, wound healing, chemotherapy and more coming in structural biology. A journal built on an organelle with this reach cannot easily become insular, because its natural authors are immunologists, oncologists, biophysicists and clinicians, not only cell biologists. My job is to commission and welcome across all of those communities deliberately, through the review and perspective series we are building, so that the connective quality of the biology is reflected in the pages of the journal.
Why should an author send their best migrasome work to Vita Migrasome rather than to a more established, broader-scope journal?
Because their paper will be reviewed by the people who understand it. The single most frustrating experience for an author in a young field is to have important work assessed by referees who do not know the organelle, miss the point, and ask for the wrong controls. At Vita Migrasome, the best experts in migrasome biology are the reviewers. That means faster, sharper, more competent review, and decisions made by people who can tell a genuine advance from a routine one. For a specialist paper, expert review is not a “nice to have”, it is the whole value of the journal. That is what I would want as an author, and it is what we are built to provide.
Setting impact factor aside, what is the measure of success you actually care about in the first few years?
Honestly, the aspiration I hold in my head is Nature Cell Biology; not the impact factor number, but the standing within the scientific community. I want us to reach the point where a migrasome paper in Vita Migrasome carries the same weight, in the mind of a serious cell biologist, as a migrasome paper in NCB. That is a measure of respect, not of metrics: it is the moment when publishing here is understood as a mark of quality rather than a fallback. If we earn that reputation, the impact factor takes care of itself. If we chase the impact factor without earning the reputation, we will have neither.
What is the scope of Vita Migrasome, what research directions does it cover, how long is the review process, and what makes it distinctive?
The scope is simple to state: Vita Migrasome is for work in which the migrasome is the central object, and that is deliberately broad. It covers how migrasomes are made and how their formation is controlled in space and time; their components and their cargo; what they do in the living organism, in development, in immunity and in disease; the methods we use to study and measure them; and their translation into diagnostics and therapies. We publish research articles, and reviews and perspectives. Wherever the migrasome is genuinely at the centre of the question, that work has a home here, whatever field it comes from.
Three things set the journal apart. First, expert peer review: your paper is read by people who know the organelle, so the assessment is competent and the decision is fair. Second, open access with no charge to authors, at least in this first phase, so that cost is not a barrier to sending us your best work. Third, a clear purpose, which is to help shape a young field rather than simply record it.
We also mean to be transparent and quick. We will state our review timelines and our standards openly, and we aim to return a first decision in weeks, not months. All of this serves a single goal: to be the centre of gravity for a young, fast-moving field, the place its community turns to first.
Where do you hope the journal, and the field, will be in five years?
I would like the migrasome field, in five years, to be approaching the scale of the autophagy field; that is the trajectory I measure us against. Autophagy went from a niche interest to a central pillar of cell biology, with a Nobel Prize along the way and a large, self-sustaining community. Migrasome biology is younger, but it is on a comparable curve, and it has the same quality that made autophagy grow; it turns out to be everywhere, and it connects to disease. If in five years Vita Migrasome is the natural first home for that community’s best work, the place people think of first, and cite with confidence, then it will have done its job. That is what I am building.
In Insights #1 we wrote that the real question is no longer whether open access failed, but who gets to define what replaces it. The conversation above is one answer — offered, for once, not from London or Boston but from Beijing.