About Cancer Informatics

Latest news

 

Read an interview with editorial board member Dr Grant Izmirlian

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 36, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters. 

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 35, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters. 

Read an interview with editorial board member Dr Georgios S. Stamatakos

Read the Editor in Chief's latest call for papers here.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 34, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters. 

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 33, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters. 

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 32, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 28, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 27, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 24, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 22, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 20, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 19, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

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Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 15, 2009.  Register to receive future newsletters. 

All papers published in 2009 now on Pubmed.

2005 backfile now on Pubmed.

The journal has been accepted for indexing in EBSCO Academic Search Complete.

Cancer Informatics is now indexed by Pubmed

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 13, 2009.  Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 12, 2009.  Register to receive future newsletters.

Journal newsletter sent to subscribers in week 7, 2009. Register to receive future newsletters.

Peer reviewers are sought. Click here to apply or to update your details.

Journal newsletter sent on week 3, 2009

Journal overview

 

Aims and scope:

We live in a time when it is widely recognized that scientific collaborations across traditional disciplines can yield exponential gains through synergy. Cancer research is currently benefiting from advances in many fields, including biology (genomics and proteomics), physical chemistry (mass spectrometry and radio imaging), computer science and biostatistics (machine learning, artificial intelligence), and many others. Medical informatics is a field nearly as wide that includes patient information systems and related critical components of information management in the information age.

Bioinformatics and computational biology appear to play a central role at each nexus, in part because novel technologies lead to immense leaps in the amount and granularity of data from patients and patient samples.
 
The aim of Cancer Informatics is to provide open access to peer-reviewed high quality manuscripts reporting bioinformatic analysis of molecular genetic and/or clinical data pertaining to human cancer risk, prevention, outcome or treatment response.

Editorial standards and procedures:

Submissions, excluding editorials, letters to the editor and dedications, will be peer reviewed by two reviewers.  Reviewers are required to provide fair, balanced and constructive reports.  

Under our Fairness in Peer Review Policy authors may appeal against reviewers' recommendations which are ill-founded, unobjective or unfair.  Appeals are considered by the Editor in Chief or Associate Editor.

Papers are not sent to peer reviewers following submission of a revised manuscript. Editorial decisions on re-submitted papers are based on the author's response to the initial peer review report.

Indexing:

This journal is indexed by:

• Pubmed
• Pubmed Central
• CAS
• DOAJ
• EMBase
• Scopus
• Google Scholar
• OAIster
  

SPARC Europe Seal award winner:

This journal has been awarded a SPARC Europe Seal. The Seal is an initiative of SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which is awarded to journals applying a Creative Commons CC-BY copyright license and that make journal metadata accessible to DOAJ.  

Amongst other important services DOAJ makes metadata OAI-compliant.  This in turn enhances the visibility of papers and allows OAI-harvesters to include the details of journal articles in their services. We encourage readers to make use of this valuable resource.  The DOAJ search page is available here.

National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy compliant:

As of April 7 2008, the US NIH Public Access Policy requires that all peer reviewed articles resulting from research carried out with NIH funding be deposited in the Pubmed Central archive.

If you are an NIH employee or grantee Libertas Academica will ensure that you comply with the policy by depositing your paper at Pubmed Central on your behalf. 

Information for authors

 
Call for papers:

Read the Editor in Chief's latest call for papers here.

Submission types accepted:

• Original research articles.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. They may cover basic science and clinical reviews, ethics, pro/con debates, and equipment reviews.
• Commentaries: focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue.
• Hypotheses: articles that present an original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable.
• Letters to the Editor: these can be either a re-analysis of a previously published article, or a response to such a re-analysis from the authors of the original publication.
• Methodology articles: these discuss a new experimental method, test or procedure. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.
• Short reports: brief reports of data from original research.
• Meeting reports: a report pertaining to activity at a meeting or conference Articles published in this journal are immediately available without delay upon publication and enjoy substantial visibility.

All submissions are subject to prompt, objective and fair peer review in compliance with our Fairness in Peer Review Policy.  Copyright in published articles remains with the author(s).  Authors are continually informed of the progress of their paper and our staff are friendly and responsive. 

One author recently wrote: "I would like to say that this is the most author-friendly editing process I have experienced in over 150 publications. Thank you most sincerely."

Criteria for publication: 

Publication is dependent on peer reviewers' judgement of papers.  Reviewers are asked to provide thoughtful and unbiased feedback to authors to ensure that the conclusions of papers are valid and manuscripts achieve reasonable standards of scholarliness and intelligibility. 

Previous work in the field must be acknowledged and papers should read without unreasonable difficulty.  Papers should fit comfortably within the scope of the journal.

Reviewers are asked to act in a fair, objective and constructive manner which maintains quality standards and helps authors to communicate their research.  They are instructed that in areas of genuinely novel research issues may be raised which cannot immediately be resolved and that absolutely rigorous validation of data may therefore not be possible. 

More information on the role of peer reviewers is available on the information for reviewers page.  Where authors consider that reviewers have made recommendations which are unreasonable, unobjective or ill-founded they may appeal them to the Editor in Chief or Associate Editor under our Fairness in Peer Review Policy.

Articles submitted to other journals:

We are willing to consider papers which have been peer reviewed by other journals but not accepted for publication. 

Protein and gene identification:

Proteins and genes should be uniquely identified to resolve the lack of clarity around many-to-many relationships for molecule identifiers and names.

Data and software availability:

If data analysis or software is essential to the paper it should be publicly available, or at least available upon request.

Services for authors:

Prior to peer review of your paper we can:

• Have your paper's reference style revised to meet our requirements,
• Have your paper's English revised by specialist English-speaking technical editors.

After peer review of your paper we can:

• Have your paper revised in accordance with peer reviewer's recommendations and have a summary of responses to the reviewers created by our specialist external substantive editors,
• Provide bound reprints of your article in colour or black and white ,
• Provide online-early rapid publication if your paper prior to typesetting.

What other authors have said:

Libertas Academica actively requests, receives and acts upon feedback from authors, readers and editorial boards.  Here's what some recent authors have said about us:

"Within a couple of days the reviewers had been procured and the manuscript was out."

"The communication between your staff and me has been terrific.  Whenever progress is made with the manuscript, I receive notice.  Quite honestly, I've never had such complete communication with a journal."

"LA is different, and hopefully represents a kind of scientific publication machinery that removes the hurdles from free flow of scientific thought."

Article processing fees:

All submissions to this journal are subject to an article processing fee if they are accepted for publication.  Article processing fees are used to fund the processing of your paper and development of the journal.  Article processing fees are the only compulsory charge you will face and do not vary according to word count, page count, colour figures or any other factor.  There is no additional charge for the author(s) to make any use of their article and no charge to readers to access it.

Full fee waivers are available for authors working in undeveloped nations and partial discounts of 20-50% are available to authors in other nations.  Authors must be able to verifiably demonstrate their suitability for a discount or waiver.  Availability of waivers and discounts is subject to monthly availability and is given at the publisher's discretion.  Waivers and discounts must be applied for prior to submission.  Neither are available after submission.

Register as a peer reviewer:

Do you wish to register as a peer reviewer?  Or are you already a registered peer reviewer but you need to update your contact details?   To register or update your details visit the peer reviewer registration form. 

Applicants must be able to demonstrate at least five years of continuous experience in the journal's subject area including at least two in the previous 24 months.

Editor in Chief profile

 

Dr. J. T. Efird completed his Doctorate in Epidemiology (Biostatistics Concentration) at Stanford University School of Medicine.  He currently is an Associate Professor at the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University (ECU) and has a joint appointment as Epidemiologist/Chief Statistician in the Center for Health Disparities Research.  Prior to joining ECU, Dr. Efird was Director of the Biostatistics Facility at the John A. Burns School of Medicine (Honolulu, Hawaii) and an Associate Member of the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii. 

Dr. Efird’s research interests include genetic epidemiology, cancer informatics, brain tumours, soft-tissue sarcomas, and HPV-related cancers.  Additionally, he is founding co-chair for the Advances in Bioinformatics and Genomics Symposium series.  Dr. Efird has over 100 publications in scientific journals and proceedings. 

Editorial Board

 

Associate Editor in Chief

Dr Zemin Zhang, Principal Scientist, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Genentech, South San Francisco, CA, USA

Dr. Zemin Zhang is currently a Principal Scientist at Genentech Inc. His group has a long standing interest in cancer genomics and informatics, with a recent focus on using next generation sequencing technologies to study genetic alterations and their functional consequences in cancer. Dr. Zhang’s research interests also include therapeutic target and biomarker discovery, computational prediction and analysis of single nucleotide variations in cancer, and study of pathogenic sequences in the human genome.
 
Prior to joining Genentech, Dr. Zhang was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California, San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Pennsylvania State University, and B.S. in Genetics at Nankai University.

Associate Editors (special issues):

Imaging:

Bradley J Erickson

Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Semantic technologies:

Christopher Baker, PhD

Associate Professor, Computer Science and Applied Statistics, Faculty of Science, Applied Science and Engineering, University of New Brunswick, St John, New Brunswick, Canada

Editorial Board:

Constantin F Aliferis, MD, PhD
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Michael J Becich, MD, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Richard HJ Begent, MD, FRCP, FRCR, FMedSci
University College London, London, UK

Silvio Bicciato, PhD
University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Benedikt Brors, PhD
German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany

Harry Burke, MD, PhD
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Paul Chang, MD
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Robert Clarke, PhD, DSc
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Kevin Coombes, PhD
University of Texas, Houston, TX, USA

Philip Crooke, PhD
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Rebecca Crowley, MD
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Hoda Anton-Culver, PhD
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Roger Day, DSc
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Thomas S Deisboeck, MD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Ramon Díaz-Uriarte, PhD
Spanish National Cancer Center, Madrid, Spain

Kim-Anh Do, PhD
Professor Department of Biostatistics, The University of Texas M.D, Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA

Eytan Domany, PhD
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Edward R Dougherty, PhD
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Translational Genomics Research Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Joachim Dudeck, PhD
Institut fur Medizinische Informatik, Giessen, Germany

Mary Edgerton, MD, PhD
MD Anderson Cancer Centre, University of Texas, Houston, TX, USA

Jimmy Thomas Efird, PhD, MSc
Director, Biostatistics and Data Management Facility, John A. Burns School of Medicine, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Ziding Feng, PhD
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA

David J Foran
The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, UMDNJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, NJ, USA

Jane Fridlyand, PhD
University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

Matthias Futschik, PhD
Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin, Germany

Debashis Ghosh, PhD
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Judith Goldberg, ScD
NYU Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

William Grizzle, MD, PhD
University of Alabama, Birmingham, AB, USA

Masami Hasegawa, PhD
The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo, Japan

Milos Hauskrecht, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Jack K Horner, PhD
President, JKH Consulting, Santa Fe, NM, USA

Tim H-M Huang
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Edwin S Iversen, PhD
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Grant Izmirlian, PhD
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

Trachette L Jackson
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Igor Jurisica, PhD
Canada Research Chair in Integrative Computational Biology, Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, University Health Network, and Associate Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Canada, Adjunct Professor at the School of Computing Science, Queen's University, and Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies

Eva K Lee, PhD
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Howard A Levine, PhD
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

Lang Li, PhD
Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Lihua Li, PhD
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Simon Lin, MD
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Ping Liang, PhD
Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, USA

Xuefeng Bruce Ling, PhD
Amgen Inc, South San Francisco, CA, USA

Jack W London, PhD
Thomas Jefferson Medical University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

James Lyons-Weiler
Director, Bioinformatics Analysis Core, Genomics and Proteomics Core Laboratories, Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Pathology, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Mia K Markey, PhD
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Gary M Marsh, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Geoff McLachlan, PhD
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Jill Mesirov, PhD
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Hiroshi Mizushima, PhD
National Cancer Center Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan

Jason H Moore, PhD
Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, NH, USA

Rakesh Nagarajan, MD, PhD
Washington University, St Louis, MI, USA

Ajit Narayanan, PhD
University of Exeter, Devon, UK

Dale O'Brien, MD, MPH
University of California, Davis, CA, USA

Michael Ochs, PhD
Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Lucila Ohno-Machado, PhD
Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, USA

Elissa M Ozanne, PhD
Institute for Technology Assessment at MGH, Boston, MA, USA

Margaret Sullivan Pepe, PhD
University of Washington, Washington, DC, USA

Joel Saltz, MD, PhD
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Ravi Sankar, PhD
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Erasmus Schneider, PhD
Wadsworth Center, Albany, NY, USA

Hemant Shah, MD, MSurg
City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA, USA

Simon Sherman, PhD
University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA

Richard Simon
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

John H Sinard, MD, PhD
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Shantanu Sinha, PhD
University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Usha Sinha, PhD
University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Sudhir Srivastava, PhD, MPH, MS
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

Georgios S Stamatakos  National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

David States, MD, PhD
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Mahlet Tadesse, PhD
Department of Mathematics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Aik Choon Tan, PhD
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Peter Tonellato, PhD
PointOne Systems, Wauwatosa, WI, USA

Alexander Tsodikov, PhD
University of California at Davis, CA, USA

Jeremy C Wyatt, PhD
University of Dundee, Dundee, United Kingdom

William J Welsh, PhD
University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA

James WIlley, PhD
Updated details forthcoming

Edith Zang, PhD
The Institute for Cancer Prevention, New York, NY, USA

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