Abstract
Greetings!
As summer draws to a close, I hope that you can all say that it was a great one!
I am so pleased to have wonderful news to share with you about International Journal of Toxicology. Our 2017 impact factor was released during the week of June 24, and it rose from 1.205 to 1.50. Needless to say, I’m thrilled and also thankful for everyone who contributed in any way, including authors, reviewers, and editorial board members! Let’s set a goal of at least 2.0 for our 2018 impact factor and get busy submitting and soliciting excellent manuscripts to the journal.
I’m eagerly looking ahead to the American College of Toxicology (ACT) Annual Meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, in November. I am particularly excited to see everyone, including our 2018 award winners, and all of the excellent science presented at our Annual Meeting. As you prepare for your presentations in continuing education courses or symposia, please give serious consideration to writing up your session for publication in International Journal of Toxicology. I talk to lots of presenters who want to publish their sessions, but I also find that presenters who write their session up as they prepare their slides are most likely to complete the task and publish an overview of the session. An outstanding recent Symposium Overview article was published in 2018 volume 1 by Emami and collaborators. 1 If I receive the session overview manuscripts early in 2019, I can cover the cost of color figures in the printed journal, so hopefully that cost saving fact, together with my assurance of quick and fair peer review, and rapid time to online publication, will encourage you to undertake this effort. I would also like to point out that for regular articles, our average time to first decision is excellent (∼2 weeks, compared to some competing journals with average times to first decisions of well over a month!) and that I can typically cover free color figures for most of the calendar year.
Many of you know, but for those who do not, ACT will host its 40th Annual Meeting in 2019. I’m looking for volunteers to promote the anniversary via revisiting high-impact articles published in earlier volumes of International Journal of Toxicology or by designing celebratory cover art for the journal.
Now for a caveat. Beware of predatory publishers. To illustrate how these “crooks” can hurt legitimate journals such as International Journal of Toxicology, I’ll share a case involving our journal that just came to my attention. A scientist (not United States based, but that does not matter) received an invitation to submit an article to a journal called International Journal of Toxicology: Current Research, with instructions to just e-mail her submission to an editorial office contact (clue 1 that this was a bad idea—the journal did not insist that authors use an online system such as Manuscript Central for manuscript submission). The authors complied, and the paper was rapidly accepted and posted online with numerous “issues,” such as the incorrect pairing of figure legends with figures. By now, the author realized that the journal to which she submitted her paper was not our journal, which is where she had originally intended to submit her paper, and she requested its retraction and removal from the predatory journal’s web site. The authors then submitted the paper to International Journal of Toxicology, where it went through 2 rounds of review, and the apparent duplicate submission was noticed by the reviewer who assessed the second revision. With the International Journal of Toxicology: Current Research paper still posted online with multiple errors, and with no response to the request for retraction, the authors received a bill for US$2720. I would have considered allowing the authors to revise and resubmit the paper to correct the deficiencies identified by the reviewer of the revised manuscript submitted to our journal, but the issue of the apparent duplicate submission to another journal made it unethical for me to do so. So bottom line, a rather interesting paper is now on another (predatory) journal’s web site, with many errors, and it could likely have been in the page proof stage with our journal if the predatory journal had not confused these authors and ignored their request to retract it. We have learned of other predatory journals with names too similar to ours, and SAGE has sent cease and desist letters to those journals on our behalf. This was my first encounter with International Journal of Toxicology: Current Research, and I have contacted the publisher again. So I urge you, even if you think that someone else might have already brought a predatory journal with a similar title to my attention, please flood my inbox when you see such deceitful tactics so that papers that should come to our journal are, in fact, submitted to International Journal of Toxicology, rather than to a predatory journal with a similar name.
I realize that this was a long “note,” but there were exciting and important matters to bring to your attention. As always, I value your suggestions, input, and most importantly, your manuscript submissions to International Journal of Toxicology.