Advances in Radiation Oncology, ASTRO's new original research journal, has closed its first issue with research including a phase II clinical trial in prostate cancer, a prospective trial in quality of life for breast cancer patients receiving radiotherapy and several clinical and medical physics reports on the use of stereotactic body radiotherapy.
"The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) is, at its core, a society primed for innovation," said founding editor Robert C. Miller, MD, MBA, of the Mayo Clinic in Florida and Rochester, Minnesota, in his inaugural editorial. "It follows that in anticipating the needs of its diverse international community and the patients they serve, ASTRO has launched its first entirely open-access journal, Advances in Radiation Oncology."
Research presented in the first edition included "A phase II trial of salvage radiation and concurrent weekly docetaxel after a rising prostate-specific antigen level after radical prostatectomy" and "An analysis of appropriate delivery of postoperative radiation therapy for endometrial cancer using the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method: Executive summary."
Dr. Miller called Advances the "natural complement" to ASTRO's two peer-reviewed journals, the International Journal of Radiation Oncology * Biology * Physics(Red Journal) and Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO). The open-access platform allows the journal and all of its articles to be available for free online for anyone to download, read and share, increasing the reach of research.
Submitting an article for peer review is free. However, if accepted, authors will pay a fee for each manuscript accepted for publication to cover the costs of peer review, indexing, typesetting and online hosting in perpetuity. Fees range from $750 for a case report submitted by an ASTRO member to $2,000 for an original report from a non-ASTRO member. In addition, papers deemed out of scope by the Red Journal and PRO may be passed onto Advances for consideration, with the author's permission; the original paper and any reviews from the Red Journal or PRO editors will cascade to Advances' editors.
"Through this open-access model, complete access to content published in Advances is available to those who can access the Internet," Dr. Miller said in his editorial. "We endeavor to broaden the scope of our audience by removing financial barriers to access. It will be particularly beneficial in nations where access has previously been limited and also to patients and their loved ones looking for treatment information."
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