In 1954, the Director of the Rockefeller Institute, Detlev Bronk, convened a luncheon to discuss the creation of a new journal as a venue for publication of this type of work.

The list of editors comprised Richard S. Bear, H. Stanley Bennett, Albert L. Lehninger, George E. Palade, Keith R. Porter, Francis O. Schmitt, Franz Schrader, and Arnold M. Seligman.

It will give special attention to reports on cellular organization at the colloidal and molecular levels and to studies integrating cytological information derived from various technical approaches."

[23] In July 2000, the journal was one of the first[citation needed] to allow authors to post the final, published pdf file of their articles on their own websites.

[27] On Christmas Day, 2005, The New York Times published an article showing that image manipulation was part of the scientific fraud perpetrated by Hwang Woo-Suk and colleagues.

In February 2006, the editors voiced the need for community-sanctioned standards for maintaining data integrity in a letter to United States National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone.

[citation needed] Mike Rossner presented a talk to the Committee at an open meeting in April 2007, in which he described the experience of JCB and the other Rockefeller University Press journals in handling image manipulation.

The Committee released its report, entitled "Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age, in July 2009.

Previously, authors were asked to convert their RGB files to the CMYK color scheme necessary for printing on paper, which results in a substantial loss of image luster.

Those CMYK files were then converted back to RGB by the publisher to post online, resulting in a second round of alteration to the original colors.

An update to the software in August 2012 allows the user to smoothly transition from 1 millimeter to 1 micrometer magnification of images assembled from optical and electron microscopes.