npj Breast Cancer Achieves New Milestone

We are excited to announce that in January, npj Breast Cancer passed the Scientific Quality Review by the National Library of Medicine for inclusion in PubMed Central, marking a critical milestone in indexing and impact factor evaluation. The Journal is now in the technical part of the evaluation process which is expected to be completed by early spring to be fully included in PMC. All articles published prior to PMC indexing will automatically be indexed.

“The success of npj Breast Cancer is a direct reflection of the time and energy that Dr. Larry Norton, Editor-in-Chief, the Associate Editors, and BCRF staff have put into the journal, which has seen 102 submissions and 41 publications to date with more in the pipeline.”

– Andrea Macaluso, Director, Outreach and Partnerships, North America & Publisher, Nature Partner Journals.

In November 2014, BCRF and Nature Research announced an exciting new collaboration as part of the Nature Partner Journals portfolio of online scientific journals. npj Breast Cancer, co-branded by BCRF and Nature Research, is an open access, online-only, multidisciplinary research journal dedicated to publishing the finest in breast cancer research.

The vision and goal of the npj Breast Cancer were to create a forum for scientific discourse that reflected BCRF’s philosophy of collaboration and community. As such it was important to welcome discovery and hypothesis-generating research and negative findings–articles that are rarely accepted in mainstream scientific press– along with rigorous peer-reviewed original research, meeting reports, commentary, perspectives and invited expert reviews. Read more about npj Breast Cancer aims and scope.

As with any new journal launch, one of the most important milestones is establishing an index factor that will attract the highest quality content from leaders in the field. That process requires a journal to be indexed on PubMed Central (PMC) and other scientific directories to ensure high visibility and citations of published work.  The challenge during the startup period is to attract the high quality content required to achieve eligibility for indexing.

To meet these goals, BCRF reached out to our grantee community to submit articles and to serve in an editorial capacity for the journal. Our staff promoted the journal at scientific conferences to solicit submissions. BCRF thanks all our investigators who submitted their articles and/or served as a reviewer.

Nature Research further encouraged submissions by reducing the Article Processing Charge (APC). The processing charge for original research was reduced from $4,000 to $2,800 for the general population and was further reduced to $2,000 for BCRF investigators.  The  APC for all other article types (unsolicited reviews, perspectives, brief communications, editorials, meeting reports, etc.) is $1,378. Further, invited reviews are always free to publish. Click here for the full guide to authors.

Efforts are ongoing to add the Journal to the following indexes: Web of Science / Science Citation Index (ISI), Emerging Science Citation Index (ESCI)– a new service from Thomson Reuters and PubMed/Medline.

Read these recent npj Breast Cancer articles on breaking research on p53 from BCRF investigators.

Identification, validation, and targeting of the mutant p53-PARP-MCM chromatin axis in triple negative breast cancer , Jill Bargonetti and colleagues.

A functionally significant SNP in TP53 and breast cancer risk in African-American women, Christine Ambrosone, Chi-Chen Hong, and colleagues.