IJMPO—A Journey of a Thousand Miles

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—a step that has vision, hard work, and motivation behind it. And then people join along, with their own visions, efforts, enthusiasm, and perseverance transforming this journey into a movement. The Indian Journal of Medical and Paediatric Oncology (IJMPO) is entering into the 42nd year of this quest in pursuit of excellence. This is indeed a milestone in our journey marked by another significant change—a change that is inspired by our commitment to our authors, reviewers, and readers. It is also inspired and motivated by our promise to provide a high quality of professional editorial and publication services. We are amidst our journey to regain the past glory and beyond; and this change was essential for us to be on the right track and focused. Our future milestones on this long enjoyable journey would be achieving Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and PubMed indexations. As Robert Frost would have put it

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

It gives us great pleasure to announce our association with Thieme Medical Publishers. Thieme is an award-winning international medical publisher serving health professionals for more than 125 years. This collaboration will help us to multiply forces and reach an international audience more effectively. It will also help us to attain a high-quality professional publication standard as expected of us by our readers, colleagues, and competitors.

The various sections promised in our inaugural editorial 2 years ago, for example, Grand Round, Drug Review, Images in Oncology, and How I Treat, have been successful in generating interest in medical oncology community. Our statistician and scientific content advisor, special content editors, editorial assistants, and advisors as well as reviewers have made it possible to improve the timelines significantly while improving the editorial standards. We have been able to clear our long waiting list for publication and can now offer AOP (Ahead of Print) First services. A manuscript will be published as soon as accepted after completion of the production process and the authors will be able to cite them using Digital Object Identifier (DOI). It is our sincere effort to reduce the submission-to-publication time to 90 days or even less as compared with current 180 days. We have changed our frequency of publication to bimonthly from quarterly and hence have been able to accept 35% of close to 600 manuscripts submitted to us last year. We may need to raise the bar further to present high-quality contemporary research from India as well as rest of the world to the global scientific community. Our journal website remains the same (www.ijmpo.org), and manuscripts can now be submitted at www.manuscriptmanager.net/ijmpo and published articles can be accessed at www.thieme.com/ijmpo.

Equitable access to drugs is a sensitive issue close to the heart of low-to-middle income countries (LMIC) oncology community. We will certainly focus on research related to it along with pharmacoeconomics, repurposing of drugs, and use of alternate dosing schedules as well as basic research on new drug development. We would also encourage more and more original research articles including high-quality systemic studies and meta-analyses. Brief communications elucidating interesting concepts as well as a letter to editor dealing with rare clinical situations, scientific concepts, or opinions about the manuscripts previously published in IJMPO are most welcome.

Today’s student is tomorrow’s reviewer who is the torchbearer of ethical publishing efforts leading to breakthroughs. Keeping this in mind, we have started a “Reviewer Training Program” wherein Doctorate of Medicine (DM) and Diplomate of National Board (DNB) medical oncology students are taught the nuances of scientific reviewing with hands on training. We must thank the Indian Society of Medical Oncology (ISMPO), our advisors, editorial board members, our reviewers as well as well-wishers for the unwavering faith and support they have provided to us in the last 2 years. Honesty, clear and swift communication, transparent editorial policies, and congenial cooperative working environment are our commitment to our various stakeholders.

So, friends, come join hands with us in this new partnership of IJMPO and Thieme! May the force be with us. Amen!

Publication History

Article published online:
28 May 2021