Abstract
An exciting aspect of this issue is a special section on Neurotoxicology. I’m pleased to report that we had some responses to our recent call for articles in the area of neurotoxicology, so this issue is heavily weighted in that direction in the original research articles presented here. You will note that I broke one of my own rules in accepting one of the articles in the Neurotoxicology section: The article by Araslandeh et al demonstrates the beneficial effects of 2 flavone molecules in an animal model of Alzheimer’s disease. Although we do not normally publish articles in the area of chemoprevention or therapeutic intervention, Alzheimer’s disease is such a devastating condition, and these authors did a credible job in this article, so, who knows…perhaps an effective treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s disease will have had its roots in our journal some day in the future.
I also want to thank a complete stranger-turned colleague for this issue’s cover art. As a way of drawing attention to this issue’s review article on paraoxonases, I wanted to feature an image of one of the PONs on the cover. Alas, I could find none that were not copyright protected, so I contacted an author who had previously published some gorgeous figures depicting PON1 in his publications and asked whether he had any spare, unpublished images of a paraoxonase that I could use as cover art. Within the hour, Dr Dan Tawfik (Weismann Institute) provided 2 figures for me to choose from for use on our cover. His generosity and talent have given us quite a spectacular cover for this issue. Thank you, Dr Tawfik!
SAGE has recently distributed another call for articles for me, this time in the area of nanotoxicology. My goal is to have the first issue of 2016 consist of our Annual Meeting poster abstracts and a collection of high-quality and diverse articles in the area of nanotoxicology. So if this is your area of study and you have a stack of data that really should be written and submitted somewhere, I’d like to encourage you to do that writing now and submit to International Journal of Toxicology (IJT) for publication in early 2016. I believe that these articles will be highly cited, which will benefit the journal; you too can benefit as an author, as I promise prompt and thorough reviews as well as publication of color figures at no charge for articles accepted for this issue. We need a relatively quick turnaround, though, as submissions should ideally be in by September 1 for publication in the January to February 2016 issue.
We are changing the selection process for the President’s Award for the Best article published in IJT. The procedure in the past has been to select the winning article, announced at the Annual Meeting in November each year, from the last 2 issues of the previous year and the first 4 issues of the current year. This gave the Publications Committee very little time to decide on the winning article (issue 4 typically comes out in early to mid-August each year) and essentially no time for the winning authors to make arrangements to come to the Annual Meeting. The new process will put the nomination process on the same schedule as the process for the other major ACT awards, that is, with a deadline of March 31. The article will be selected from the entire previous issue (with the exception of the 2016 award, which will be selected from the last 2 issues of 2014 plus the entire 2015 volume). The process will also be online; yes, we’ll be bidding farewell to the old hard-copy nomination form.
College Spirit (American College of Toxicology [ACT] spirit, that is) will be apparent in the next issue, as we are fortunate to have summaries of 4 sessions presented at the 2014 ACT Annual Meeting available for all to read. As I did not attend any of these sessions in person, I found the summaries informative and reflective of the hard work and excellent science that went into each of these sessions. I’m hoping that you agree, and that all session chairs and cochairs for the 2015 Annual Meeting are already talking with their speakers to make next year’s issue with session overview articles even more reflective of the outstanding content of our annual meetings!
Thank you for your ongoing support. If you are a new ACT member and would like to get involved in the journal as an author or a reviewer, please let me know. If any member, long time or new, has some thoughts about strategies to improve or expand IJT, please contact me with your suggestions.