| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Editorial |
As Editor-in-Chief I don’t often get the opportunity to address my fellow scientists unless it is in the form of a decision letter. It is easy to think of contributing to academic journals as engaging in a one-way process. The author submits a manuscript, which is reviewed, hopefully accepted, and then published for critical public examination by the readership. However, I invite all of us to remember that journals were originally founded in correspondence. At its heart, this is what scientific publishing remains: an exchange of ideas and data, a means for our community to reach out to one another intellectually, a dynamic relationship. In publishing, we so often talk about the "reader" and the "author," perhaps forgetting that they are often one and the same, contributors to the scientific process of mutual discovery. In this spirit of fellowship, I want to share with you selected highlights of the common pursuits in which we in the editorial office of The American Journal of Pathology are engaged with you our colleagues.
The AJP continues to demonstrate its strength in reporting the best research in the field of investigative pathobiology. The most recent journal impact factors were released by Thomson ISI last summer, with the AJP earning an impact factor of 6.441 for 2004.1 With this result the AJP retains its position as the number one-ranked journal in general pathology; however, it remains our goal to build on this standing, and continue to expand our reach and therefore the impact of your work. Impact factor is but one measure of a journal’s influence in the field, just as "pathology" could be considered an arbitrary designation for what is simply the investigation of biological disease mechanisms, whether in the guise of immunological, physiological, molecular, or cellular approaches. Although we appreciate the visibility that these numbers provide us, we do not regard this as a true and complete representation of the value of this literature and thus are resolved to increase the AJP’s impact in various ways.
To that end, I am pleased that the distinguished experimentalist Dr. Peter Ward has joined our team as Special Associate Editor. Dr. Ward has long been a prominent and well-respected member of the scientific community, and we are excited that he will be contributing his energies to the evolution of the AJP. Dr. Ward’s first undertaking is the development of an exciting new series of Biological Perspectives for the AJP. These focused review articles will provide state-of-the-art perspectives and mechanistic figures summarizing basic science advances and translational research to offer a better understanding of biological processes and more effective therapeutic interventions in human disease. Look for the first article in this series to appear in Spring 2006.
In 2004 we announced the appointment of a new Scientific Editor. Many of you who have published with the AJP in the past year may have had the good fortune of working with Dr. Audra Cox. I hope you have found her a valuable resource in assisting you to refine and polish your abstracts and articles.
Perhaps you have seen research from the AJP publicized in various news outlets. In April we began an expanded media release program to highlight exciting studies published in the AJP. Each month we select one or two articles that may be of special interest to the public. Recent topics covered in these media releases have included tumor profiling, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. News stories featuring these articles have appeared online and in print in the lay press of the United States and abroad. If you receive e-mail announcements from the AJP (which I encourage each of you to do, by signing up for free content alerts from the website), these monthly press releases are delivered directly to your e-mail inbox. Look for this month’s release spotlighting H5N1 influenza research, a timely topic because of the current bird flu outbreak.
Furthermore, we continue to seek ways to make the review and publication of your work more efficient. Our average turnaround time to first decision for reviewed manuscripts is now 35 days and improving, with currently 
20% of submitted manuscripts eventually being published in the AJP. Time from acceptance to dissemination will be shortened to a matter of a few weeks with our implementation of website prepublication (fastPATH). For a sneak peak of upcoming articles, I invite you to visit our website now to preview the Tables of Contents for future issues (fTOCs). Keep your eye on this section because soon these fTOCs will include links to the prepublished versions of articles. From this prepublished content, the National Library of Medicine will be able to index abstracts for earlier inclusion of your work in PubMed.
The AJP is also pleased to announce its affiliation with PubMed Central, by which content will be available not only on our website but also on the PubMed Central repository. As an added benefit to this affiliation, we are now in a position to facilitate compliance with the enhanced public access rule that the National Institutes of Health announced in May 2005. The AJP editorial office will submit articles funded by the National Institutes of Health directly to PubMed Central on behalf of our authors, with instructions to make those articles freely available to the public six months after print publication. This is the same point that the definitive version is publicly accessible from the AJP website.
There are many other subtle and not so subtle ways that we continue to better the AJP, both in content and exposure. We continue to add new features to the website, such as the lists of the 50 most-read and 50 most-cited articles in the AJP, expanded announcements, direct information about obtaining "permissions," and other requested information along with improved search and indexing features. Additionally, the Instructions to Authors have been fine tuned to include updated information regarding submission requirements and fees, confidentiality and copyright issues, and expanded descriptions of author- and reviewer-related standards of conduct.
The American Society for Investigative Pathology will begin offering a certified continuing medical education program, incorporating content from the AJP. Dr. Mark Sobel has outlined this effort in a special notice to readers, below.
I hope you agree that we continue to improve the quality of the AJP by developing better content for our readers and expanding the services that we offer our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members. As I said above, scientific publishing is a dynamic relationship and reflects the sharing of ideas and aims that are central to each of our pursuits of scientific discovery. The things that drive you in your research and that drive you to submit and read the AJP are the same things that drive us. Therefore, we will be instituting a series of surveys asking readers and authors to grade our performance and tell us what you would put on your wishlist for the AJP’s future. I invite you to actively participate and look forward to your responses. At any time, I welcome your thoughts on how we can make the AJP better still.
Message from Mark Sobel, M.D., Ph.D., Executive Officer of the American Society for Investigative Pathology
To further enhance the visibility of journal articles and as a service to the pathology community, the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP) is launching two continuing medical education (CME) programs based on articles published in The American Journal of Pathology, entitled "ASIP Journal CME Program in Pathogenesis," and in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, entitled "JMD CME Program in Molecular Diagnostics." The goal of the ASIP Journal CME Program in Pathogenesis, which is accredited for 50 CME credits, is to highlight the latest advances in cell and molecular biology of diseases, the mechanisms underlying basic physiological processes, and how these pathways and mechanisms contribute to pathology and disease. Participants will answer questions regarding overall scientific conclusions and experimental methodology of selected articles of The American Journal of Pathology. See the back of this issue for the first set of CME questions based on this month’s content.
References
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
