© 2008 American Thoracic Society DOI: 10.1165/rcmb.2008-0005ED
After 20 Years, What Next for the Red Journal?
Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor As one who has been associated with the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology as an author, reviewer, Editorial Board member, Associate Editor, and Deputy Editor, it gives me special pleasure to continue to serve both the Journal and the American Thoracic Society as the new Editor of the AJRCMB. I would like to thank the ATS Publications Policy Committee, the Search Committee, and the ATS Board for their faith and confidence in selecting me for this position at what is clearly a critical time for the ATS and the Journal. Of course, I would be remiss for not praising the previous Editor, Steven D. Shapiro, for the outstanding job he's done in enhancing the international reputation of the Journal, and doing so in a manner that seems extraordinarily simple—by publishing the best science. I would like to continue this momentum, including increasing the impact factor and publishing the best basic, translational, and animal study research in the world. I plan to continue the "Insights into Lung Pathogenesis" on the inside cover, and continue "getting the message out" that we are the journal for publication of the latest relevant translational and animal studies. I also think it is important to the pulmonary community to continue the present three-journal policy, with AJRCCM ("Blue"), AJRCMB ("Red"), and PATS ("White") all being published by ATS. For those of us who were around when the Red journal was initiated in the late 1980s, the same reasons for its existence still apply: the readership and target audience for each of the journals differ, and each journal occupies its own particular niche. In this regard, I plan to appoint deputy editor(s) to be involved in further improving cooperation between the Red and Blue journals, and charged with proposing joint articles/reviews that focus on animal/cell/human materials, potentially beefing up translational aspects of both journals. One would have to be living in a vacuum not to appreciate why the next few years represent a critical time for all of the ATS journals. From my perspective, I see three areas that deserve special mention. The first of these is a movement toward more electronic journals, or at least a larger electronic component for existing journals. The younger generation of pulmonary scientists is much more familiar with these procedures, and the proper use of, for example, the journal website and repository can save money, alleviate concerns about page limitations and the cost of color micrographs, and allow access quickly and to a greater number of interested parties. While there are numerous pros and cons involved, I believe that an eventual switch to an electronic format, with probably a year or so of having both paper and electronic versions available, is inevitable. Clearly, we don't want to upset the upward trend of the Journal's impact factor, but in the long run we don't want the Journal to be "left behind" without paying attention to the latest and more progressive technologies. As an aside and related to the next paragraph, there is a growing perception that articles readily available electronically tend to be cited more in subsequent papers. Second, there has been much discussion by numerous interested parties about increasing the impact factor of the Journal, and certainly Dr. Shapiro has done an excellent job of doing just that. As many of you are aware, the actual generation of the impact factor number is really just a snapshot in time, using papers cited over a finite time period, and as such is not truly reflective of a journal's or even a single paper's true "impact" over time. Nevertheless, we would be burying our heads in the sand if we ignore it totally, since it is a number generally accepted as reflecting a journal's value, especially outside the United States. What I believe to be extremely important is that we not be seduced into initiating procedures that can be perceived as artificial means to increase the impact factor, which in the long run could seriously damage the reputation of the Journal. Dr. Shapiro showed that by resisting suggestions to "play these games" we still could increase the impact factor by simply accepting and publishing the best science, and letting this feed on itself. It is my opinion that this could be the baseline/impetus for a more aggressive approach that would include special issues/review articles devoted to specific diseases or specific cell types, as well as a "year in review"-type summary. The third area I would like to see expanded is to make the Journal more international in both the number of papers it would publish from outside the United States and increasing its readership (along with ATS membership). Specifically, I am interested in pursuing the possibility of having the Red, and perhaps the other ATS journals, translated into other languages, and having these translations available electronically. For example, while serving as Deputy Editor, I had established communication with certain individuals in the Chinese government charged with serving as liaisons between scientists, government, and industry. Of course, I would not limit these sorts of endeavors to China and would include investigations into doing this in other nations as well. On a more personal note, lung disease is not an abstraction for me: my wife Diane, to whom I was married for 35 years, passed away last spring from metastatic lung cancer, approximately three months after it was first diagnosed. What shocked me when she started treatments was that treatment options were essentially the same as 15 years ago: nonselective metabolic inhibitors and radiation. My thoughts at the time were that, with all the work being funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, with all the publications related to carcinogenesis and pathogenic mechanisms of disease, where are the "breakthrough" type of studies that could lead to new therapies and treatments that could approach neoplastic diseases from different perspectives rather than just different combinations and/or newer formulations of drugs already available? Clearly, there is a need for performing and publishing novel and innovative studies in this and other disease-related areas, and the Red journal, from my perspective, is and will continue to be the place to report advances in basic pulmonary/respiratory mechanistic research. I plan to charge the Associate Editors and Editorial Board members with focusing on novel and innovative aspects of submitted papers as much as possible. In closing, I again thank the ATS committees for their confidence in my ability to be an effective Editor of the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology, and thank Steve Shapiro for the opportunity to serve as Deputy Editor during his tenure as Editor. I look forward to the next five years and hope that some of the issues I touched on above will become reality during this period, and that the Journal will continue its upward trend in the eyes of the scientific community. While this clearly is a major challenge, it is a challenge that I welcome.
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