Dear Colleagues,
Happy New Year and thank you! Everyone who has supported Cancer Prevention Research (CaPR) with his or her readership, review, or submission of work has made this “state of the journal” letter an unalloyed pleasure to write. The National Library of Medicine's Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC) selected and accepted CaPR for indexing in PubMed after only our fourth issue. We were approved after our first application, which, as discussed below, is an uncommonly quick recognition of high quality. We could not be more pleased with this critical step in the development of our young journal and with its important implications for you, the readers and contributors of the great work published in CaPR.
This PubMed listing is not news to many of you since AACR heralded this accomplishment in an impressive, comprehensive manner: e-mail blasts to all 28,000 AACR members, institutional librarians, cancer centers, and cancer prevention and control directors; a banner ad on the CaPR journal Web site, Cancer Prevention Journals Portal, AACR Publication page, and AACR Web site; announcement on electronic tables of contents and alerts for CaPR sent out to all registered users; targeted E-blasts to all worldwide prevention investigators in the AACR mailing database (e.g., all attendees to Frontiers in Cancer Prevention meetings); transition slides between sessions at the Frontiers meeting; stickers announcing the PubMed indexing on the cover of all AACR journals distributed at the Frontiers and all other AACR meetings through the Annual Meeting; and AACR “house” ads in CaPR.
CaPR published many important discoveries and reports in 2008, such as the following examples: novel translational findings on the prostaglandin transporter by the Raymond DuBois group (Holla et al.) and a companion Perspective by Sanford Markowitz; a seminal randomized trial of DFMO plus sulindac that dramatically reduced colorectal adenomas by the Frank Meyskens and Eugene Gerner groups (Meyskens et al.) and a Perspective by Michael Sporn and Waun Ki Hong; epigenetic prevention of intestinal tumors in mice by the Peter Jones group; targeting AP-1 transactivation in estrogen receptor–negative mammary cancer prevention by the Powel Brown group (Shen et al.); preclinical prevention studies of heat shock protein 90 inhibitors by the Andrew Dannenberg group (Hughes et al.); comprehensive animal model studies of the effects of dietary energy balance on cell signaling pathways (notably Akt/mammalian target of rapamycin) by the John DiGiovanni and Stephen Hursting groups; preclinical development of novel analogues of the natural agent deguelin by the Ho-Young Lee group; two lung cancer risk model articles—one on host genetic factors integrated with clinical-epidemiologic risk factors and one on risk modeling in African-Americans—by the Margaret Spitz group; health policy articles (e.g., on regulatory, economic, and patent policies affecting chemoprevention drugs by Henry Grabowski and Jeffrey Moe); aberrant crypt foci in the Adenoma Prevention with Celecoxib trial by the Monica Bertagnolli group (Cho et al.); the application of high-throughput technology to premalignant lesion (Barrett's esophagus) progression by the Brian Reid group (Li et al.); a novel clinical genomic model for early lung cancer detection by the Avrum Spira group (Beane et al.); high-profile commentaries, such as the one by Martin Blaser on microbe-induced cancer; and other important translational Perspectives, including by Robert Strieter on the emerging role of and targeting CXC chemokines in aberrant lung angiogenesis, by Caryn Lerman and Trevor Penning on genomics of smoking exposure and cessation, by Ernest Hawk and José Guillem on provocative findings on chromoendoscopy for sporadic and Lynch syndrome colorectal polyp and adenoma detection, by Jean-Pierre Issa on epigenetics and cancer prevention, and by David Sidransky on head and neck and lung carcinogenesis.
The authors mentioned above are but examples of the world-recognized leaders of cancer prevention who have contributed work within the translational, clinical, and basic science scope of CaPR. CaPR articles have led to important press coverage in 2008. For example, The New York Times devoted a front-page article to the critical recent analyses by the Ian Thompson group (Redman et al. and Lucia et al.) and high-profile Perspective (Christopher Logothetis and Paul Schellhammer, the 2008 President of AUA) indicating that the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial did not increase high-grade prostate cancer and reduced the rate of clinically significant prostate cancer, leading to the reevaluation of finasteride for standard prostate cancer prevention.
This great work by prevention researchers is responsible for the early listing of CaPR in PubMed by the LSTRC which selects only 140 multidisciplinary scientific journals for review and approves only 20% at each of its three annual meetings. The 140 journals comprise past and present applicants for PubMed indexing. Journals must wait 2 years to reapply if not selected in the first try and 3 additional years if not selected in the second try. The first-try approval of CaPR reflects our high rating for the LSTRC review criteria of quality, originality, and importance of science to readers throughout the world.
Even before our PubMed listing, we have enjoyed rates of PDF downloads that rival those of articles in other top peer-reviewed journals. Credit for this impact goes to the extraordinary quality of work we are publishing and to the AACR marketing and publications personnel who, for example, have trumpeted CaPR contents throughout the world. Furthermore, last month CaPR began online publishing of abstracts from the AACR Frontiers meeting. These abstracts are citable and archived as part of the journal's content. Coupled with PubMed indexing, the information published in CaPR will have a steadily increasing impact.
CaPR is kicking off 2009 with great new articles in this issue, including an original article by the Silvio Gutkind group on novel mouse studies of mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitors in head and neck cancer prevention (Czerninski et al.) and a report by the Gary Stoner group on mechanisms of the natural agent anthocyanins in the rat esophagus (Wang et al.). In addition, CaPR and the family of AACR journals will embark on two new services. First, authors' copy-edited final articles will be published weekly online before the monthly print issue. The date of online posting will be the official date of publication, and the monthly print issue will follow with its articles citing the online publication date. This process will enable authors to communicate their research findings more quickly than in the past. Second, AACR will deposit to PubMed Central accepted manuscripts on behalf of authors reporting NIH-funded research. AACR will send the accepted peer-reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central for posting 12 months after final publication. After AACR's deposit of the manuscript, NIH will communicate directly with the author regarding the submission. This process will free authors with NIH funding of one of the steps required of them by the NIH Public Access Policy.
Again and on behalf of all editors and AACR personnel working on CaPR, I thank the worldwide cancer prevention community for its indispensable support and contributions to our early success and growth. Our successful application for indexing in PubMed increases the impact of CaPR and is a harbinger of great things to come. I am very excited for CaPR, the AACR, and the field of cancer prevention and look forward to years of stimulating, ground-breaking work that will appear in the pages of this great young journal.
With best wishes for 2009,
Scott M. Lippman
Editor-in-Chief
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