JANUARY 2000 VOLUME 13, NUMBER 1 © Copyright 2000 by the American Chemical Society
Editorial CRT for the Next Thousand Years Happy new millennium! If you’re like me, you’re glad it’s here and you’re looking forward to doing and reading science in the most exciting time in our history. In the editorial offices at CRT, we are especially excited about the journal and its future. We’ve made changes to improve the editorial coverage of the journal, shorten the time it takes to publish articles, broaden the exposure of published work in the scientific community, and cut costs to authors and readers. Specifically, we’ve: • Expanded the number of Associate Editors and their responsibilities • Implemented new features in the web version of the journal • Eliminated page charges for all submissions • Cut the personal web subscription price Sound interesting? Read on. First and foremost, I’m delighted to welcome Judy Bolton from the University of Illinois at Chicago as our newest Associate Editor. Judy brings strengths in reactive intermediate chemistry and mechanisms of toxicity and carcinogenesis. She has been a prolific contributor to the journal, and the editorial staff is looking forward to working with her on a regular basis. I’m also pleased to announce the appointment of Paul Hollenberg as Feature Editor. Paul is one of the founding editors of the journal and is a great Associate Editor. His new responsibilities will include the oversight and editing of all our special publications such as Reviews, Perspectives, and Forums. These articles are essential for setting the direction of CRT, and Paul’s assignment is a confirmation of the importance we attach to them. Along with our other Associate Editors, Fred Guengerich and Jim Stevens, we have an outstanding group of dedicated, fair, and compassionate Associate Editors. The web version of CRT continues to grow in impact and capabilities, which we highlight with this month’s cover. ACS has made tremendous strides since they launched the web versions in January 1998, and they continue to refine their products and push the envelope of electronic publishing over the Internet. This creates tremendous value for our readers and greatly facilitates the wide dissemination of our articles. In the early days of web publishing (if we can refer to two years ago as early days), most readers just opened the PDF version of the article and copied it for later reading. But statistics show that more and more readers are using the html versions of the articles because of the enhanced features they contain. For example, readers can download three-dimensional coordinates of molecules to view and manipulate structures in real time. Or they can open QuickTime videos to watch on their screens. Readers also can move effortlessly from one article to another by opening links to Chemical Abstracts 10.1021/tx9904760 CCC: $19.00 © 2000 American Chemical Society Published on Web 12/28/1999
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and Medline in the reference list. Remember how difficult it used to be to run down all the articles you needed for that seminar or prelim exam? You can probably do it now in an afternoon without inflaming your allergies by dusting off old journals in remote sections of the library. And CRT articles are published fast. All our articles are accessible from our homepage very shortly after the corrected galleys are returned by our authors. For CRT, this means articles appear on the web about 4-8 weeks before they appear in print. Despite all these terrific new features, the cost of publishing in and subscribing to CRT is decreasing. ACS has eliminated page charges on all articles published in CRT. The page charges weren’t that much to start with, but now they’re gone. Also, the cost of a personal web subscription is only $50, which is actually a bit less than the cost of a print subscription. And the library subscription rate is a real bargain. ACS recently did a comparative survey of the per-issue costs to libraries of several leading journals in toxicology and found that CRT was 2-4fold less expensive than its competitors. That’s quite a bargain for a journal with the highest impact factor of all toxicology journals publishing primarily research articles. Not surprisingly, this attractive pricing has led to a steady increase in subscriptions. And site licenses are placing CRT on the desks of every undergraduate and graduate student in many major universities throughout the world. So the future looks very bright for Chemical Research in Toxicology. Through hard work and outstanding support from the ACS, we have built a journal that has had a major impact on the way people do and read research at the interface of chemistry and toxicology. We look forward to expanding the breadth of what we publish while maintaining its high quality. And we are confident that we will be publishing articles in an increasingly attractive and feature-laden way. So come join the fun as we finally move into the new millennium. Lawrence J. Marnett Editor TX9904760
