Thirteen years ago the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics hired me as the editor of JLME. For the last ten of those years, our partner Wiley-Blackwell Publishing (then just Blackwell) helped us produce an increasingly renowned and widely-read journal. Those years marked gratifying growth for our publication, and we will forever be grateful to Blackwell and then Wiley for the fine work they did in bringing our journal to a wider audience. However, with this issue, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics embarks on a new journey. We are proud to inaugurate a new publishing partnership with our journal and SAGE Publishing.
Our plans for the next five years are bold: SAGE will continue to provide JLME with the worldwide exposure that it deserves to both academics and a larger audience on a global scale. Just as the intersection of law, medicine, bioethics, and public health take on more diverse questions and challenges, the scholarship presented in JLME needs to be available and accessible to all of our members and readers across the world. SAGE will provide that on a level that JLME needs in order to meet our growing audience. JLME will, of course, be available in print and on the ASLME website (aslme.org) to all of our readers. To see JLME's online presence outside of our website, check out jlme.sagepub.com.
The timing of this transition is fortunate: at a time of discussion of the importance of global scholarship, we publish the second in our first-ever, two-part symposium, “Harmonizing Privacy Laws to Enable International Biobank Research,” guest edited by Mark A. Rothstein and Bartha Maria Knoppers. This issue, like our last, features specialized studies from Uganda, India, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more. Throughout the issue(s), we find that each nation profiled has its own unique set of challenges and questions that must be navigated for international biobank research to be advanced. Together, both this issue and our last provide a comprehensive globe-spanning examination of biobanks, laws, privacy interests, and customs and how these cuttingedge repositories affect regular people in the real world. It is a fitting introduction to a new era at JLME, I think, as we merge global questions with research that is as grounded and real as the people these laws are intended to protect. We are so pleased you have joined us here at the start of JLME's next great voyage of discovery.
