efisGeneral Assembly,

Palais des Congrés, Paris

8, September, 2006.

Attendants:
EFIS Board Members:
F.Y.Liew (president), S.H.E. Kaufmann (vice-president), Sergio Romagnani (past president) Reinhold E. Schmidt (treasurer), Anna Erdei (secretary general)

Vice president nominees: Catherine Fridman-Sautes - present

Klas Karre - did not show up

Delegates:

COUNTRY/SOCIETY	NUMBER of MEMBERS	DELEGATES in block letters
Austria	536	Hannes Stockinger, Herribert Stoiber
Belarus	0
Belgium	0	Oberdan Leo
Bulgaria	40	Snejina Marinova-Mitova
Croatia	186	Sabina Rabatic
Czech Republic	400	Ales Macela
France	1200	Alain Bernard, Armand Bensussan, Joel Pestel
Germany	1588	Stefan Meuer, Andreas Radbruch, Werner Solbach
Greece	370	Panagiota Boura
Hungary	450	George Füst
Ireland	70	Cliona O’Farrelly
Israel	80	Ramit Mehr
Italy	824	Silvano Sozzani Luciano Adorini
Baltic Societies (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania)		Vytas Tamusinas
Poland	300	Andrzej Mackiewicz
Portugal	300	Jocelyne Demengeot
Romania	185	Dorel Lucain Radu
Russia	70
Serbia Montenegro	70	Gordana Leposavic
Scandinavian Societies (Sweden/Finland/Denmark/Norway/ Iceland)	1170	Olli Vainio Roland Jonsson Tina Trollmo
Slovakia	170	Milan Buc
Slovenia	30
Spain	670	Dr.Margarita López Trascasa Dr. Cándido Juarez
Switzerland	104	Beat Imhoff
The Netherlands	1300	Cees Melief Rene van Lier Frits Koning
Turkey	360	Gunnur Deniz
United Kingdom	2688	Chris Rudd, Adrian Hayday, Judith Willetts

Agenda

EFIS General Assambly

Paris

Room Maillot

Palais des Congrés

12:30; 8 September (Friday) 2006

1. The Agenda was adopted and the Minutes of the last GA held in Montreal were approved

2. President's report (F.Y. Liew, see Appendix #1)

3. Secretary General's report (A.Erdei, see Appendix #2)

4. Treasurer's report (R.E.Schmidt - see Appendix #3)

No comment was made following the report.

5. Immunology Letters Editor-in Chief's report (V.Horejsi see Appendix #4)

6. Bids to host European Immunology Congress - EFIS 2009

Result of voting:

British Society: 27

Czech Society: 5

Turkish Society: 9

7. Election of new Board Members

Result of voting:

for vice-presidency:

Catherine Fridman-Sautes: 34

Klas Karre: 9

for the treasurer’s post:

Hannes Stockinger: 34

José Ramón Regueiro: 3

For Editor-in-Chief of Immunology Letters

Vaclav Horejsi: 35

Dorel Lucian Radu: 6

8. Address by the incoming President, Stefan H.E. Kaufman

He thanked Catherine Sautes-Fridman, her team and Colloquim for the tremendous work they done for the success of the first “Pan-European” immunology conference. On behalf of EFIS he gave a present to the newly elected Vice-President.

S.H.E.K. extended a warm welcome to the new board members. Also he thanked the leaving board members for their great enthusiasm and help. Similarly, he thanked the past president for his achievements as president.

The president then outlined briefly the major topics for his presidentship:

1) Support for research through sponsorships for meeting attendance, short-term visits of laboratories etc.;

2) Education through an improved curriculum in immunology;

3) Politics and administration mostly through interactions with EU/EC and the ERC;
4) Public awareness, mostly throught strengthening the Day of Immunology which will go global next year

To item 2: President’s report 08.09.06.

“It has been exactly 3 years in Rhodes since I took over the Presidency of EFIS. During my acceptance speech, I made the following policy statement.

1. Improve the financial status of EFIS

2. Promoting Immunology profile

3. Lobbying for Immunology

4. Greater transparency

I would now like to report to you how we did with these original goals.

1. Financial status of EFIS

EFIS cannot function without funding and there is no membership due, which goes directly to the IUIS. The only source of income to the EFIS is the royalty from Immunology Letter, which provides an income of about 200k per year to EFIS. From this we support a range of scientific activities, mainly in the form of fellowships, lectureships and specialist meetings. This will be detailed by the treasurer’s report later.

Three years ago, Immunology Lett was in crisis because we were not able to attract enough papers to fill the journal. Vaclav Horejsi was recruited as the new editor in chief. Vaclav will report on the state of the journal later. Suffice is to say that Vaclav managed in a short time turned the journal around and we are now rejecting over 80% of ms with significantly reduced editorial expenses. The future of the journal is bright and the financial source of EFIS is therefore secured.

Over the past 2 years, Rolf Zinkernagel, Gunter Hammerling and I have been able to negotiate with Wiley-VCH to secure royalty for EJI. This we have now achieved and Wiley will now pay EFIS a royalty of over Euro 250k per year starting from January 2005. This has been a difficult and delicate negotiation took over 2 years and the final signature was done only a few weeks ago. This has not been a trivial exercise, something we had not been able to achieve over the past 35 years.

The royalty from EJI will more than double the income of EFIS and we are now able to double our effort to support Immunology in Europe.

2. Promoting Immunology Profile

From the onset, Stefan Kaufmann proposed the idea to set up a Day of Immunolgy. This he had carried out with considerable success with the help of Dr. Sabine Englich. The detail of the DOI activity has been reported earlier by Stefan at the opening ceremony of the ECI2006. Suffice is to say that our DOI is so successful that IUIS is adopting it for a global day of Immunology.

We have been one of the driving forces in the establishing ECI. I should here give credit particularly to Professor Reinhold Schmidt who took a very active part to see it through. The success of the ECI is here for all to see. At Rhodes, I predicted 5000 delegates at the Paris ECI, and this has now been realized. The effort of the French Society is of course instrumental in this great success and I like to congratulate Catherine and her team on this great achievement. You have now paved the way of success and also set the gold standard for subsequent ECIs.

Over the past 3 years, we have supported numerous meetings and fellowships. The detail of which will also be reported later by the treasurer and the secretary. This is the main reason for the existence of EFIS.

3. Lobbying for immunology

EFIS is not a political organization but an organization promoting the interest of Immunology. That is enshrined in EFIS constitution. Therefore, it is the duty of the EFIS Board to lobby the European Commission to get a fair share of the European research budget to support Immunological research. To this end we have recruited Arnd Hoverler who works in the EC to be our EU liaison officer. Arnd did a very good job in alerting the EFIS of various EC initiatives. The EFIS Board has made sure that Immunology is appropriately represented in the FP7.

Another important development in the EC is the establishment of ERC. On behalf of the Immunological community, the EFIS Board has been successfully in nominating Rolf Zinkernagel to the Council of ERC. Rolf will now be able to represent Immunology interest at the highest level of EC research.

On a global scale, the EFIS Board has been able to increase the European Immunology profile in the next ICI 2007 to be held in Rio by actively participating in the scientific programme committee. The % of speakers and chairperson for the congress is now 35% European immunologists, compared with about 20% in previous ICIs. This I feel is more representative of the global immunology activity.

4. Transparency

To increase transparency of EFIS, we have greatly improved our website. This is due mainly to Anna Erdei and her colleagues in Budapest. The website is now user friendly, comprehensive, and regularly visited. It is now a major source of communication and openness.

We also have regular auditing of our financial affair and the admin expenses are kept to the minimum (less than 10%) so that we are able to use at least 400k euro per year to support research, fellowship and promotion of Immunology.

As a result of these, EFIS is now an organization attractive to our leading immunologists to play an active part. This is evident by the keen contest of membership of the EFIS Board.

According the constitution of EFIS, I shall step down as President of EFIS at the end of this general assembly and hand over the leadership of EFIS to Stefan Kaufmann, who I am confident will improve EFIS activity further.

I like to take this opportunity to thank all of you to have elected me. I also like to thank my fellow Board members for their support and great royalty. It has been a fraction-free Board and we all enjoyed greatly doing our job. It has been a great honor to serve the EFIS as its President for the past 3 years.

My motto has always been that: (1) what we do should make a difference and that (2) it should be fun in doing it. I think we have achieved both.”

To item 3: Secretary General’s Report

A. E. emphasized that communication with EFIS-members is going smoothly.

Since the last GA in Monteral (2004) the EFIS Board held 7 meetings:

Brussels (November, 2004)

Rome (April, 2005.)

Glasgow (July, 2005)

Berlin (November, 2005)

Istanbul (March, 2006)

Paris (July, 2006)

Paris (Septembr, 2006)

The Minutes of these meetings were sent out to all Member Societies.

A.E. mentioned that the EFIS-homepage (www.efis.org), which is maintained by Dr.I. Kacskovics in Budapest provides a very fast and active service to get information about various EFIS-activities. A.E. encouraged all EFIS-members to use this homepage and asked each Society to inform her about changes in the Board of their Society, to make communication continuous and easy.

Finally A.E. thanked the cooperation of the Societies, and expressed her hope, that it will remain the same in the next years.

to item 4

Treasurers’ Report March 2006

Balance November 2005 (as per last report) € 293.670,79

Income ./. Spending after last report until March 2006 € 40.895,32

Balance March 2006 € 334.566,11

Income Nov. 2005 – March 2006

Elsevier Science IMLET € 95.473,57

Return of EFIS bursary Nina van Sorge € 3.600,00

Credit Interest € 1.576,60

Invoice from Brechin (double payment) € 1.362,83

Amount re-transferred by Prof. Liew

IUIS Support for EFIS 2005 € 843,31

Spending 2006

Support for Meetings and fellowships € 30.637,58

DOI activities EFIS € 20.000,00

Costs for for Immunology Letters € 6.216,00

Board and Administration € 4.198,39

Bank fees and duties € 545,68

Payment invoice Brechin Tindal Oatts € 363,34

Solicitors, fee note Prof. Liew

To item 5

Immunology Letters (2006, September - Paris)

1) Changes made soon after I became Editor in Chief:

· only 5 Executive Editors (Garside, Minato, Moretta, Stockinger, myself)

· Editorial Board was partially changed (at present in total 38 people)

· cover was changed for a more attractive one

· reference style was changed for a more standard one in immunology

· electronic submission system introduced

· reviews recruited systematically

2) The electronic submission system (EES) works well after some technical features were improved. The manuscripts are usually reviewed in less than 3 weeks after submission (referees are asked to provide reviews in 2 weeks). Papers are available online as “uncorrected proofs” cca in 3 weeks after acceptance and are available in printed form cca 2 months after acceptance. Communication with the publisher is reasonably good.

3) In contrast to many previous years, when lack of manuscripts was the main problem of the journal, in the last 2 years our main problem has been a too high manuscript inflow. The volume of the accepted manuscripts has been higher than the page limit of the journal (the publisher did not like it, it resulted in considerable backlog of accepted papers waiting for definitive publication in printed form with all bibliographical details). Therefore, since the last year we have considerably increased the stringency of review process and thus rejection rate (in the last 8 months it was more than 80% - so only less than 20% of submitted manuscripts were accepted). We reject about 50% of the reviews without review (only quick editorial review). It seems that the backlog problem has been basically solved at this moment (only 12 accepted manuscripts waiting for publishing in the next issue).

4) The average quality of the accepted papers is clearly getting better. The impact factor for 2005 increased to 2.16, (it was 1.71 in 2003 and 2.01 in 2004) but this still cannot be a result of our efforts (at least a 2-year delay, so our results should be visible in 1-2 years from now).

5) There are regularly 1-3 (mini)reviews in every issue. At the moment, we have about 10 promised for the next 6 months (and 10 others for the rest of the year). The authors are receiving their 200 EUR fees for the invited reviews. The recipients of the EFIS Lecture Awards do provide their obligatory (mini)reviews.

6) Special issues:

In the last 3 years we had 5 Special Issues:

„Catalytic antibodies“ Volume 103, Issue 1, (28 February 2006) Guest Editor A.Gabibov (4 reviews, 7 research articles)

„Signals and Signal Processing in the Immune System“ Volume 104, Issue 1-2, (15 April 2006) Guest Editors A.Erdei, J.Matko, J.Gergely (13 reviews, 8 research articles)

„Celebratory Issue“ Volume 100, Issue 1, (15 August 2005) (Editorial by the President of EFIS, 9 reviews, 4 research articles)

„6^th EFIS Tatra Immunology Conference“ Volume 97, Issue 2, (15 April 2006) Editor V.Horejsi (9 reviews, 3 research articles)

„Signals and Signal Processing in the Immune System“ Volume 92, Issue 1-2, (29 March 2004) Guest Editors A.Erdei, J.Matko, J.Gergely (9 reviews, 17 research articles)

In my opinion, due to sufficient inflow of original manuscripts and reviews, it is probably not necessary to organize Special Issues to fill up the journal page volume, as it used to be in the past. However, it will be useful to preserve as an exception the traditionally very good special issues based on the “Signals and signal processing in the immune system” conferences organized by the Hungarian colleagues.

7) To summarize, everything goes quite well (better than I expected 3 years ago) and I am confident it will be even better after the impact factor rises (hopefully above 3-3.5) and the journal becomes more attractive for authors. All the Executive Editors, including myself, are willing to serve for 3 more years, because the most difficult part of the job is hopefully over and now it is easier (more routine).

Plans for future

1) Keep all the present Executive Editors, perhaps try to recruit one additional from USA. Change some members of the Editorial Board (for more active ones).

2) Probably abolish Short Communications and limit Letters to Editor – these types of manuscripts are usually of low quality.

3) Continue to publish 2 or more invited (mini)reviews per issue.

4) How to attract better original experimental manuscripts? Probably it will go automatically after IF reaches higher values – our goal is something between 3 and 4. We should try to attract more contributions from the US. It has no sense to urge people to submit their good manuscripts just because it is a journal important for EFIS…

Vaclav Horejsi

5th September 2006

The new EFIS-logo: