Ongoing expansion of journal activities to meet the needs of stakeholders

My tenure to date as Editor-in-Chief for Neuro-Oncology has been a privilege and a passion. I am immensely grateful for the generosity of the editorial board and their dedication and commitment to ensure that the needs of all stakeholders are addressed. I would like to thank Annie Huang who completed her term as Associate Editor this year and who was instrumental in highlighting and prioritizing pediatric neuro-oncology submissions. I also welcome Matt Dun who will handle basic and translational pediatric neuro-oncology submissions to complement Maryam Fouladi’s and Bill Weiss’s great contributions. To address the increase in manuscripts incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning, Spyridion Bakas has also agreed to serve as an Associate Editor, and Quinn Ostrom will join Jill Barnholtz Sloan in handling epidemiology and biostatistical focused manuscripts. The expansion of the Associate Editors, commitment of the Editorial Board members, and the addition of the recently graduated Editorial Scholars from the class of 2023, all contribute to high-quality and efficient peer review. This is important since the numbers of submission to Neuro-Oncology continue to increase, with a 25% increase since 2023 and currently more than 100 submissions per month. I am extremely grateful to the Board, Managing Editor Elizabeth Martinson, and the team at Oxford University Press who work collectively to keep our target for the time for initial review of all manuscripts at 14 days and time for the first decision below 30 days.

In my role as Editor-in-Chief, it has been exciting to witness the growth of the field and advances in scientific discovery through the publication of research accomplished by dedicated and committed researchers. The significance of the work published in the journal is evident from the increased impact factor (IF) from 15.9 to 16.4 this year.¹ This will rank the journal 4^th of 277 in clinical neurology and 15^th of 322 in oncology journals. The CiteScore is another citation metric that has increased from 2022-2023 (22.5 to 27.2). The 2023 CiteScore ranks Neuro-Oncology 4^th of 400 neurology titles, 10^th of 230 cancer research titles, and 14^th of 404 oncology titles in the Scopus® categories. Both the IF and CiteScore metrics are based on similar principles: the number of citations received by a journal in a given year to papers published in a given period of time (2 years for the IF vs. 4 years for CiteScore) divided by the number of papers published by that journal in that time period. We are grateful to our colleagues nationally and internationally in choosing the journal to highlight their work, and we continue to work diligently to ensure a rapid, fair, and transparent review process.

The annual retreat of the Editors-in-Chief of the SNO family of journals and the SNO, EANO and Oxford leadership was held in May 2024. We were pleased to see the rising use of journal content online (increasing by 6% in 2024 to date and by 7% in 2023), reflecting the expanded access of published content to the scientific community. One major focus of the meeting was on the topic of data integrity. There has been an increase in notifications of post-publication image irregularities reported either by readers or anonymously through PubPeer. In these instances, the journal follows the guidelines provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and works closely with authors to resolve the issues. In some cases, the concerns have escalated to institutional ethics committee levels. Our traditional peer review process remains vital for evaluating the importance and relevance of research, but this, in isolation, cannot address the issue of data integrity, especially those related to image analysis. Oxford is currently evaluating digital technologies that assess images to be integrated into the pre-publication process that would complement the text similarity checking software already in use. In addition, following best practices of other journals, Neuro-Oncology will initiate the requirement for a Data Integrity Supplement for all articles accepted in which full data is provided and where attribution of the data (figures/tables) to specific contributing authors will be required.

It is clear that the foundation of the integrity and stewardship of research data will always be based on trust and the ethical conduct of investigators, but all stakeholders need to be involved and accountable, including institutions, funding agencies, and publishers. Emphasis on training the next generation of researchers in these areas remains critical, and we are planning to add this specific topic to the Editorial Scholars Program in 2024. We would like to congratulate the 2023 graduates who will now be assigned an ad hoc reviewer role for Neuro-Oncology and to thank their supervisors for supporting them over the year. We are grateful to the mentors in the program for their time and generosity in making the program a success. On behalf of Roy Strowd, the steering committee, SNO leadership, and the Oxford team, we are excited to welcome the 2024 scholars who will begin the program in the summer:

Lorena Viviana Baroni, MD; Hospital de Pediatria Prof Dr Juan P Garrahan, Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Alipi Bonm, MD, PhD; Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, WA

• Jennifer Cahill, PhD; Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA

• Hamza Gorsi, MD, MPH; Central Michigan University College of Medicine, Detroit, MI

• Julia Hoveyan, MD; Pediatric Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Yeolyan Hematology and Oncology Center, Yerevan, Armenia

• Ignacio Jusue-Torres, MD; Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Eau Claire, WI

• Larrey Kasereka Kamabu, MD; Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo

• Sara Khan, MD, PhD; Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH

• Maximilian Mair, MD, PhD; Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

• Jose Ricardo McFaline-Figueroa, MD, PhD; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA

• Christopher Michael Morrison MD, PhD; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

• Sumanth Nagabushan, MD; Sydney Children’s Hospital Randwick, Randwick, Australia

• Bryan Joseph Neth MD, PhD; Mayo Clinic Rochester, Rochester, MN

• Haley Kopp Perlow, MD; The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH

• Amit Persad, MD; Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA

• Zhaohui Wang, PhD; Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, Woodland Hills, CA