I would like to welcome members of IBMS and the wider bone/mineral community to the revamped IBMS website. We hope that you’ll find this site easier to navigate and fun to use. You will find links to our meetings, journal, and BoneKEy, the knowledge environment that IBMS created a decade ago to use the power of the internet to facilitate the spread of information about our field.

It is a time of great excitement in the bone field, but also a time of substantial stress. The devastation of the world economy has had ripples that have affected funding of research by governments and industry, as well as a growing impact on all aspects of medical care. In that environment, the IBMS is committed to finding innovative ways to further our mission. Our most exciting innovation has been the decision to join with the Nature Publishing Group to substantially upgrade the capabilities and performance of BoneKEy. A portion of the new BoneKEy that will be launched in January, 2012 will be “BoneKEy Reports”, a collection of authoritative reviews available for free to members of IBMS. The new BoneKEy, still a work in progress, will be the site for a growing number of activities from webinars, to meeting reports, to portals for affiliates and interest groups in the field. Professor Serge Ferrari, the current Editor-in-Chief of BoneKEy is doing a masterful job of orchestrating this transition. So stay tuned for more details.

In addition to our journal and BoneKEy, the major activity of IBMS is the sponsorship of meetings. A longstanding but increasingly dominant theme for IBMS has been to partner with societies around the world to assure the highest quality and success of these meetings. Our premier international meeting recently held in Athens was co-sponsored with ECTS; the upcoming meeting in Kobe, Japan in 2013 will be co-sponsored with the Japanese Bone and Mineral Society. Our yearly Sun Valley meeting, ably run by Professor David Burr, is supported by travel awards to young investigators sponsored by the ASBMR. We are co-sponsoring the next meeting of the ICOBR in Xian, China on September 20-23, 2012, along with the Chinese Medical Association (CMA) and the International Chinese Hard Tissue Society (ICHTS). Our multi-disciplinary bone oncology meeting, sponsored by the IBMS Cancer and Bone Advisory Committee (formerly CABS), will be held in Lyon France in the fall of 2012. Particularly in these days of fiscal constraint, we are excited about and grateful for all of these collaborative opportunites to advance the field…with more to come.

With our world-wide mandate, the challenge of communication is daunting. I invite all members and possible members of IBMS with suggestions or comments of any sort to feel free to write to me at info@ibmsonline.org to further this communication. I’ll be updating this letter regularly (a deliberately vague term that will allow for lapses during grant-writing time) and hope to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Henry Kronenberg
IBMS President