About | CBM - Cahiers de Biologie Marine

A short history of the CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine

The international scientific journal CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine was founded in 1960 by Professor Georges Teissier, head of the Zoology Department at Sorbonne University (Paris) and director of the "Station Biologique de Roscoff", a marine laboratory located on the Northern coast of Brittany (France). This laboratory was created in 1872 by the French zoologist Professor Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, who at the same time founded another journal entitled " Archives de Zoologie expérimentale et générale". The two journals published numerous scientific papers in close relationship until 1981, the year at which the Archives de Zoologie expérimentale et générale released its last issue.

Georges Tessier in the Garden of the Station Biologique de Roscoff in 1957 (left). The first issue of the CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine was printed and published in 1960 (right).

Georges Teissier (1900-1972) was a darwinian zoologist, specialist of Cnidarians. He directed the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1946 to 1950 and was also among the very few who, at the beginning of the 20^th century, contributed to develop in France different research fields such as development biology, biometry, population genetics and evolutionary biology. The initial scopes of CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine included virtually all aspects of marine organism biology and their natural environment, as Georges Teissier was particularly keen to allow researchers to publish on very diverse fields of marine biology. At that time, international collaborations were not as common as today and Georges Teissier wanted to develop exchanges among researchers from different coasts. Thus, whereas most scientists were still publishing in their native language, he offered the opportunity to publish in any language, along with a French abstract accompanying the article.

Download the original presentation of the CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine (in French) by Georges Tessier.

After the death of Georges Teissier in 1972, Joseph Bergerard and Yvette Neefs took over the coordination of the CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine journal until 1983. From 1984 to 1994, Pierre and Bernadette Lasserre directed the journal and notably increased the list of accepted languages. André Toulmond and Claude Jouin-Toulmond took care of the journal from 1995 to 2003, and contributed to the modernization of the journal by designing a new cover.

Since 2004, Bernard Kloareg, Dominique Davoult and Nicole Guyard have considerably modernized the CBM-Cahiers de Biologie Marine, accompanying the developments in marine biology and the progress in the ways of communication among scientists: CBM - Cahiers de Biologie Marine is now exclusively published in English, but still with a French abstract, and is now published online, with more than 60 years of archives available for subscribers. CBM - Cahiers de Biologie Marine remains however faithful to its initial ambitions and still offers to its readers a large diversity of topics in marine biology. Systematics has for long been a major field of the journal, but numerous other topics are now often published, including recent aspects of marine ecology, molecular phylogeny, biogeography, physiology, etc.

In 2010, CBM - Cahiers de Biologie Marine celebrated its 50 ^th anniversary. For this special issue (50-1), a focus was made on the symbiotic acoel Symsagittifera roscoffensis (Graff, 1891), an emblematic species of the shores of Roscoff, which was the subject of one of the first articles (volume 1, issue 2, 1960) published in the CBM - Cahiers de Biologie Marine. In 2018, the journal has benefited of the creation of a brand new website and an editorial comity, coordinated by Dominique Davoult, and composed of four researchers from the Station Biologique de Roscoff institute, specialized in different fields of marine biology and ecology: Professor Eric Thiébaut, Dr. Didier Jollivet, Dr. Thierry Comtet and Dr. Christophe Six.

Editorial Board

Dr. Thierry Comtet

Researcher at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Group “Dynamics of Marine Diversity” (DyDiv)

UMR 7144 "Adaptation & Diversity in Marine Environment" (Sorbonne Université-CNRS)

Station Biologique de Roscoff