It is my great pleasure to announce imminent launch of a new, high quality open-access, journal publishing research on effects of radiation exposures on human health and on regulatory policies developed to inform and to protect human population. The scope of the journal will be broad and will cover all radiation types and all types of research studies – it will be a “comprehensive approach to health policy research” (for details see here). I have an honor to become its first Chief Editor and, this morning, I signed the agreement with the publisher.
The specialty ‘Radiation and Health’ will be published as a part of the Swiss open access journal ‘Frontiers in Public Health’.
Here are some excerpts from the message I received from the Frontiers:
“Dear Dr Leszczynski,
It is with great pleasure that I invite you to serve as Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Radiation and Health, which is a specialty of Frontiers in Public Health.
Frontiers is a Swiss, Gold open-access academic publisher launched in 2007 as a grassroots initiative by scientists, on the campus of the EPFL. Founded on a collective desire for a better publishing option, Frontiers is the first publisher to have developed its own customized IT platform to specifically facilitate open-access publishing and offer novel solutions to peer-review.
Since then, Frontiers has become one of the fastest-growing publishers: over 25,000 world-leading scientists serve as editors in our journals, with publication rates doubling each year, 4 million monthly page views and partnerships with international organizations such as the Max Planck Society and the IUIS.
Frontiers has recently partnered with Nature Publishing Group to advance the global open science movement. I encourage you to read more about this partnership here.
Articles published in Frontiers have been featured in BBC, Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, El Mundo, and other major news outlets.
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Following the success of our first journals, we are now applying the Frontiers publishing model to the Public Health and I am pleased to invite you to serve as Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Radiation and Health.
What makes Frontiers Special?
1. A fair, fast and transparent peer-review
Unique real-time and interactive peer-review between authors and reviewers
Publication of reviewers’ names with each article, enhancing accountability and ensuring recognition.
2. Tier-climbing publishing process that facilitates integration, distillation and dissemination of outstanding discoveries
3. Open-access – unrestricted global visibility of articles
All articles are published under a gold open-access “Creative Commons” license and authors retain copyright.
Publishing fees among the lowest in serious open-access publishing
4. Researcher- and community-based
Journals are rooted in academic communities and are run only by world-renown researchers.
Frontiers developed the first and only “research network” in publishing: disseminating publications to relevant experts, increasing article impact profoundly
5. Strong IT focus
Our web platform is designed in-house, evolving according to constant feedback from users in order to continuously improve the accountability, efficiency, quality, fairness, and impact of scholarly publishing.”
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The Specialty Chief Editor is ultimately responsible for building and maintaining an editorial board [see my call for Associate Editors here] of 15-20 Associate Editors and 200-300 Review Editors, as well as driving the journal to publish at least 120 high-quality articles per year in the specialty. Frontiers has successfully established and tested a streamlined plan for building editorial boards and driving manuscript submissions. If this plan is followed closely, this task is rather seamless and can be completed within a few months of the launch of the journal.
The Specialty Chief Editor sets the vision and ambition of the journal. There are some essential tasks for the Specialty Chief Editor to complete in order to ensure success.
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An important task of Specialty Chief Editor is to appoint a top class and enthusiastic Associate Editorial Board of 15-25 editors to represent all the facets of your specialty. These are leading scientists that will oversee the review of manuscripts,
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I hope you will become actively involved in our novel approach to scholarly publishing and I am looking forward to your engagement in Frontiers!
Best regards,
Your Frontiers in Public Health team
Frontiers | Public Health Editorial Office
www.frontiersin.org | twitter.com/FrontiersIn
EPFL – Innovation Square, building I
Lausanne, Switzerland | T 41(0)21 510 17 11
“
It is a new and very exciting opportunity for me and for all researchers, decision makers and journalists involved in the issues of radiation effects on human health. By the proposed comprehensive approach to public health policy in ‘Radiation and Health’ it will be possible to gather in one site all information necessary for the tasks of developing health policies, risk estimates and public information procedures as well as science used to justify and back up all the above tasks.
BRHP - Between a Rock and a Hard Place 