Sleep and Vigilance

Sleep, a pervasive, prominent and universal behavior, which occupies a third of human life. However, why we sleep remains unclear and it is one of the enigmas of modern neuroscience. Sleep loss and sleep deprivation has deleterious consequences. Many research laboratories across the globe evaluate sleep at the intersection between the cellular and the systems level. Such approaches are needed to understand the purpose of sleep. Within the sleep field, several of the predictions and hypotheses are often explored using simple to complex animal models, high-density EEG, and other synthetic approaches such as a large-scale computational simulation of multiple brain regions. Understanding how brain activity across behavioral states provide a conscious experience, which has pivotal implications for several clinical fields such as translational neuroscience, neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology. This is a rapidly growing area with a wide research base, yet currently has no dedicated journal. To fill the void, this is where the proposed journal 'Vigilance' comes into picture. Vigilance will provide such unique platform to collect and disseminate state-of-the art scientific understanding on research in the increasingly overlapping fields of basic, translational and clinical sleep medicine. Vigilance will be a a Springer owned journal in collaboration and editorial support from the Indian Society for Sleep Research (ISSR), which aims to publish exemplary peer-reviewed manuscripts directing neurobiological investigation related to normal and altered vigilance states. Vigilance will be a broad-spectrum international scholarly journal, which aims to publish rigorously peer-reviewed, high quality research manuscripts within the biomedical as well as clinical research under one roof so that the translational research in sleep medicine can be nurtured and promoted. Therefore the wide scope of the journal will aid in contributing a great measure for the excellence in the scientific r esearch. Support in the research community for Vigilance has been widespread, and the journal has already secured several leaders in the field as members of its editorial board. This multidisciplinary journal will render a global podium for biomedical and clinical researchers to share their scientific excellence. Vigilance aims to attract research articles, case reports, clinical investigations, review articles and short communications from basic, translational, and clinical aspects of sleep research. Vigilance will cover a wide range of topics in this discipline and creates a platform for the authors to contribute towards the advancement in basic, translational, and clinical medicine. Areas covered include, but not limited to measurement of sleep across phylogeny, ontogeny, sleep functions, sleep organization at molecular, cellular, systems, and behavior levels, mechanisms of behavioral states regulation, molecular/genetic approach to studying sleep, neural substrates of altered states of consciousness, large-scale computer simulations to 3D modeling. At the clinical frontiers, areas such as chronobiology, primary sleep disorders and co-morbid sleep disorders will be covered. Journal will also cover translational and interdisciplinary clinical research related to all areas of sleep medicine in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and management of sleep disorders.