Abstract
I am writing this as Autumn finally sets in the Midwest, and we’re likely all reading this as Winter starts to raise its (ugly) head.
In reminiscing about International Journal of Toxicology (IJT ) in 2019, it has been a year of challenges and successes. The challenges included recruiting an abundance of high-quality papers. Successes included publication of the highest number of review articles (6) in 2019 since I officially took over my role as Editor in 2009 and recruitment efforts by the Editorial Board of articles for publication in IJT. A very successful review article by Koontz and collaborators 1 was recruited for publication in IJT by one of our newest Editorial Board members, Dr Erica Carroll. Thank you, Dr Carroll; that sort of support is so valuable to me and to the quality of the journal, so I hope to have more success stories of this sort to report in coming years.
Another success was the publication of a blog post as part of a new initiative of our publisher, SAGE. Dr Helen Prior was not daunted by the challenge to develop a blog post for her article “Integration of Consortia Recommendations for Justification of Animal Use Within Current and Future Drug Development Paradigms,” 2 also published in 2019 in IJT. Check out this great article on the #SAGEJounalsblog: Exploring the appropriate use of #animals within #drugdevelopment. For those who would like to read Dr Prior’s blog, here is the post link: https://journalsblog.sagepub.com/blog/guest/medicine/exploring-the-appropriate-use-of-animals-within-drug-development. If there are other articles for which you feel a blog post would bring good publicity to our journal, please either contact me or the authors themselves, and encourage them to follow suit.
Another success for IJT was the recent recording of a podcast by Dr Armaghan Emami, a toxicologist with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration, and 2019 award winner of Best Paper Published in IJT for her first-author publication, “Toxicology Evaluation of Drugs Administered via Uncommon Routes: Intranasal, Intraocular, Intrathecal/Intraspinal, and Intra-Articular.” 3 In her podcast, Dr Emami discussed her inspiration for the collaborative paper, key considerations for the design and interpretation of studies utilizing an uncommon route, and provided advice to fellow scientists who wish to form a working group or collaborative publication. I thank the podcast subcommittee, particularly the chair, Dr Amy Mihalchik-Burhans, for the efforts to produce our first ever podcast by a Best Paper awardee. The podcast can be viewed at this link: https://www.actox.org/meetCourses/podcasts.asp
Finally, please see my Commentary in the most recent Cosmetic Ingredient Review (2019 Vol. 38(3)), wherein I point out the very positive critique of the Cosmetic Ingredient Review Expert Panel in JAMA Dermatology! 4
Looking ahead to 2020, I hope to make the first issue of the new year very American College of Toxicology (ACT) centric. I plan to feature an article by Dr David Serota, who led the planning committee for the celebration of the anniversary of ACT’s 40th annual meeting at the 2019 annual meeting. The article will summarize previous years’ highlights of ACT’s accomplishments and leaders, and should be informative for newer ACT members, and a nice trip down “memory lane” for more veteran ACT members. For those of you who are finishing up session overview articles from last year’s ACT annual meeting, this would be a great time to send them in, for publication early in 2020. For those of you who have a head start on overview articles based on sessions developed for the 2019 annual meeting, I thank you for the effort and look forward to featuring those articles in Issue 1 of 2020, as well.
Thank you for your ongoing support and suggestions to make IJT a special journal for ACT members, and all of our readers worldwide.