JANUARY 2007 VOLUME 20, NUMBER 1 © Copyright 2007 by the American Chemical Society
Editorial 20th Anniversary Issue Editorial With this issue, Chemical Research in Toxicology begins its 20th year of publication. I have had the privilege of serving as Editor from the beginning and watching the journal grow from an idea to a first-rate venue for publishing science. It is just one person’s opinion, but I think Chemical Research in Toxicology has had a significant impact on the way toxicology, especially chemical toxicology, is practiced and published. Editing a journal, especially a start-up journal, is unlike anything else I have done in science. It is a rewarding exercise in creating something out of nothing. Whether the journal flourishes is completely dependent on an unseen community of scientists, who provide every breath of its existence. The journal needs to attract authors who will publish good papers; it depends on reviewers who are willing to donate their time to provide critical but fair commentary; it needs to interest readers so that the articles will have an impact. Getting a journal off the ground not only requires a lot of hard work in the Editorial office but also a lot of support from the unseen community of authors, reviewers, and readers and commitment from a dedicated publisher. The process is extremely dynamic, especially in the age of electronic publishing where things change rapidly, no single publication model has achieved dominance, and the competition is fierce. Author and reader expectations are constantly adjusting to the competitive landscape, and the bar is always getting higher. So the fact that Chemical Research in Toxicology is doing well after 20 years is a tribute to the community that supports it and to the commitment of the American Chemical Society. In the beginning, Paul Hollenberg and I were colleagues at Wayne State and served as the Editors with the help of our Editorial Assistant, Celeste Riley. We knew it would be a challenge, and the magnitude of that challenge was driven home to us with the first issue. We sent off a large stack of high quality manuscripts to Columbus, Ohio for typesetting and got back a first issue that was all of 77 printed pages! What a shock! Those manuscripts had looked so big when we sent them off, but they made a rather thin journal issue, and we had to do it again and again and again.... Fortunately, the journal caught hold, and our community grew along with the journal. I moved to Vanderbilt and Fred Guengerich joined as another Editor. Later, we added Judy Bolton and
Chris Bradfield as Editors and Stephen Doster as Editorial Assistant. We have a very good team of loyal, hard-working, and effective Editors and I am extremely grateful to them for our success. About 10 years ago, we became active participants in the reinvention of scientific publishing by migrating the journal to an electronic format. I have written in previous editorials that I was surprised at how quickly the transition occurred and how completely it has transformed our lives as scientists. You were all active participants as well, so I will not recapitulate what has occurred, but I will ask you to think for a moment how you used to read journals, search the literature, and enter bibliographic information for citations 15 years ago and how you do it now. The transformation has been truly amazing and has made our lives much easier in some ways. But the fundamentals of publishing remain the same. One has to attract good papers, review them fairly, then publish them in a way that will reach the most viewers. On that score, I think we are doing quite well. In fact, Chemical Research in Toxicology is at the strongest point in its history. Our Impact Factor remains at the top of all toxicology journals that primarily publish research articles, and our Immediacy Index is the highest of all toxicology journals. Comments made to me at meetings indicate that people appreciate what we are doing, and the number of slides I see in presentations citing articles published in Chemical Research in Toxicology is always very high. We are providing a very fast turnaround time (five weeks to first decision), we have a new web-based editorial management system, and Chemical Research in Toxicology is currently available internationally in 3,100 libraries, which puts it on the desks of a large percentage of practicing scientists in the world. Most importantly, we are publishing really good science. Paging through recent issues, I find terrific papers at the frontiers of chemistry and toxicology. I recently organized a symposium entitled Milestones in Chemical Research in Toxicology for the annual meeting of the Division of Chemical Toxicology. In choosing papers, I scanned through all 19 years of the journal and looked for topics that had remained fresh and offered promise for the foreseeable future. I was very pleased with what I was reading in going through
10.1021/tx600323j CCC: $37.00 © 2007 American Chemical Society Published on Web 01/16/2007
2 Chem. Res. Toxicol., Vol. 20, No. 1, 2007
the journal. I truly got a sense of the scope of our accomplishment and the debt that we owe to our community. We will commission a special celebratory issue of Chemical Research in Toxicology to highlight the journal’s accomplishments later this year. We will incorporate some other special features throughout the year, including continuing to publish a few more Future of Toxicology Editorials. This has been an extremely well-received series that has helped highlight critical issues facing the field of toxicology in the immediate and distant future. Those of you who read my Editorials know that I have been urging the American Chemical Society to address the open access issue. The Board of Directors recently adopted a new policy called Author Choice, which enables authors to pay to have their articles completely open access from day one. I think this is a great deal, and I will devote my next Editorial to the open access issue in general and Author Choice in particular. In fact, I think it is such a good deal that I have taken advantage of it myself. An article that I published in the October, 2006 issue
Editorial
of Chemical Research in Toxicology is the first fully open access article published in ANY American Chemical Society journal. The Editors and staff are very proud of what we have accomplished with Chemical Research in Toxicology, and we are extremely grateful to the members of the community who support us. It has been an exciting and productive 20 years. But our emphasis is not on the past but rather on the future. Over the course of this year, we will unveil our plans for building on what we have accomplished to make Chemical Research in Toxicology a top venue for publishing science for the next 20 years. Lawrence J. Marnett Department of Biochemistry, Center in Molecular Toxicology, Vanderbilt UniVersity, School of Medicine, 23rd AVenue at Pierce, Room 854 MRB, NashVille, Tennessee 37232-0146 TX600323J
