What’s new about Acta Oncologica for 2016?

Acta Oncologica celebrated its 50-year anniversary in 2013 [1,2]. Different activities in connection with the celebration have contributed to greater attractiveness of the journal, although this likely started years ago. Greater attractiveness means more submissions of articles to the journal. During 2015 we will exceed for the first time more than 1000 submissions. A continuous increase has taken place during the past decade from below and around 200 before 2005. Together with higher average quality of the submissions, there is an increasing demand for more pages, not to reject too many also very good articles, or not to delay pagination of accepted articles. All of these things have happened during the past years. In 2014, the number of issues every year increased from eight to 10, but this increase rapidly turned out to be insufficient. Thus, from 2016, 12 issues will be published, which is good for the authors having a greater chance to have their article accepted and paginated earlier. As all accepted articles are published online within a few weeks, and thus available for all subscribers and others, early pagination may not be that important, but apparently is. Many potential authors frequently ask about time to pagination, and not only handling times during the reviewer process. It is also possible to check the Acta Oncologica website for the size of the “backlog”, i.e. accepted but not yet paginated articles. It has been too long during recent years with delays up to 4–6 months or occasionally longer. This will hopefully diminish.

More issues every year is of course also of benefit for the subscribers and all other readers of the articles in the journal. This requires that the quality of published items remain at a high level. The editors guarantee that this will continue, and also that the review process will be timely. Even if clearly improved, the far majority of submitted articles are handled within 30 days, much remains to do for certain articles. We are sorry for long handling times in a few manuscripts. Attractiveness is also determined by the journal impact factor (JIF), i.e. how often articles published during the two preceding years have been cited during the year in question divided by the number of published articles. The citation index has also steadily improved during many years, although this development lately more looks like an irregular saw than a continuously increasing slope (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Acta Oncologica impact factor 1999–2014.

I cannot come up with a good explanation that the JIF for 2014 decreased from all-time high in 2013. During 2013, the 50-year anniversary year, Acta Oncologica published totally more articles than ever before, and that number contributed to the decrease relative to 2013. We ambitiously continue to increase the JIF by attracting and accepting the good articles (likely to be frequently and rapidly cited). Unfortunately, there is no good correlation between article quality and number of citations during the coming two years – although it is the measure used for ranking the journals.

Acta Oncologica has basically been published by the same publisher for decades, although under different names due to a changing world among the companies. For a long time it was Scandinavian University Press, then it became Taylor & Francis, followed by Informa Healthcare, and now back to Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis is one of the leading academic publishers in the world, and currently publishes about 2350 scholarly journals, many in cooperation with societies and foundations like Acta Oncologica all over the world. The company operates from about 20 regional centers, including Stockholm, Oxford, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Beijing and Singapore. This enables the company to operate both globally and locally all over the world, combining the advantages of a large publisher with the advantages of a local publisher, such as personalized service and a thorough understanding of its region. The change in name is not only cosmetic, but has also led to several changes that the Acta Oncologica Foundation believes will be of benefit for both readers and authors. The company has worked with journal editors, including myself, authors, and librarians over the past year, listened to the feedback and combined it with some of the leading innovations in scholarly publishing, and created a new style for the journal. You will still recognize Acta Oncologica, although with a reimagined layout reflecting recent developments in publishing, better meeting the needs of today’s scholarly community.

We also believe that the readers and authors will benefit from many features on the new Taylor & Francis Online. The journal web pages host information related to the journal, such as article level download and citation data, e.g. “Most Read” and “Most Cited” article information. For the authors, altmetric ‘doughnuts’ will provide a new level of detail on how articles are used after publication, including information on news coverage, social media engagement and geographic outreach. The newly revamped Author Services website guide you easily through getting published, whether you are a first-time author or someone more experienced looking for the latest tips, insights and guidance.

Once you have activated your account, you will also be able to access My Authored Works, a dedicated center for authors who have published with Taylor & Francis. It is possible to download your article, check how many other people are looking at it, view its citations and access your altmetric data. I have as a now old scientist never cared for the altmetric data, but the world is changing, and for young scientists, these may become much more relevant.

Most of the activities by the Acta Oncologica Foundation during the past years promoting the journal will continue. The support of one or two scientific symposia, attracting many participants actively contributing with scientific articles [3–7], in turn attracting many citations, every year is much appreciated and likely is the main reason for the greater attractiveness. The support of invited lecturers to other scientific meetings presenting an “Acta Oncologica Lecture” will also remain [8]. The 50-year activity focusing on Young Investigators [9–12] appears to be a success, but will be further evaluated prior to a new workshop will be organized.

I hope scientists have found it rewarding to publish your work in Acta Oncologica, and will continue to do so, and that you all have enjoyed reading articles in Acta Oncologica during 2015 and that this will continue also during 2016 and the coming years thereafter.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no confl icts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.