Supplementary material for journal articles

On our online platform, informahealthcare.com, we encourage authors to take advantage of our multimedia supplementary material feature when publishing their articles in any Informa Healthcare journal. As an author, you may wish to publish additional files containing information that is peripheral to the conclusions of the paper, but that further demonstrate the results or significance of your work, alongside the main article content that will be printed in an issue. This supplementary material could be valuable to specialist readers, while not necessary for other readers to understand and appreciate the methods and conclusions in the main article files. This material is hosted online together with your article PDF and HTML and is viewable to all subscribers and pay-per-view customers and can, on request (and with agreement of the Editor), be made free to all users.

This feature provides authors with a number of options to further enhance their work. For example, by using video or animated figure files, it is possible to visually demonstrate a biological or technical process. Audio files may be used to support topics discussed in speech and language pathology articles. You can include large data sets within your papers, containing some background information (e.g., genome sequences, gene expression profiles, extended data), which may allow readers to use the information to fully investigate the implications of your research. Surveys, presentation slides and detailed chemical/metabolic pathways are just three more examples of what can be included.

The informahealthcare.com site can accept supplementary material in almost any format, including .doc, .xls, .ppt, .gif, .jpg, .mov, .mp3, .wma, .wav and .pdf. Any supplementary files that you wish to include should be submitted to the editorial office together with the main article files, and will be reviewed as part of the normal manuscript peer-review process. The Editor will make a decision regarding whether the additional content is suitable for inclusion.

Jonathan Collard
Electronic Production Manager

Rising Impact Factors, Strong Growth, Solidifies Journals as Leading Resources

Informa Healthcare – one of the world’s leading medical and scientific publishers – has released its latest Journal Impact Factor* results, with outstanding performances across the division’s diverse selection of peer-reviewed journals.

Highlights included Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which registered a staggering 10.216 Impact Factor, up 23% from 8.306 last year; The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, increased more than 55% to 5.564; and Chronobiology International jumped up to 3.987.

Impact Factors are a method of measuring the influence which a journal has on the scientific community. They are calculated by Thomson Reuters and are designed to indicate how many times the published articles of a journal are cited during the course of a year, providing an insight to how much ‘impact’ the journal is making on the scientific community.

“The Impact Factor can help validate the importance of our journals to the medical and scientific communities we serve,” explains Phil Garner, Divisional Managing Director at Informa Healthcare.

“We are extremely proud of the high quality information which we publish for our readers and the wide range of healthcare fields covered by our titles. We are delighted that this year’s Impact Factor increases for each journal clearly reflect the quality and importance of the research and pinpoint how much it is being used throughout the year”

Informa’s Expert Opinion series – which provides in-depth analysis of the pharmaceutical R&D pipeline – has registered noteworthy performances in Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs which increased its Impact Factor to 4.218, and Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery which impressed with a first-ever Impact Factor of 3.345.

“These results demonstrate the comprehensive, intelligent content that makes our Expert Opinion journals the definitive reference source for leading pharmaceutical scientists,” says Phil.

Four other Informa titles to enter the market with a remarkable impact include: Journal of Immunotoxicology with a first-ever impact factor of 1.218; Computer Aided Surgery with an impact factor of 1.221; Logopedics, Phoniatrics Vocology had a 1.175 Impact Factor in its first year; and Australasian Psychiatry entering the market at 0.657.

“We are justifiably proud of the performance of all of our journals,” adds Phil. “Our established journals have continued to move from strength to strength, with many titles solidifying an upward trend in their respective rankings.”

The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry moved up 22 places in the Psychiatry category, while the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Impact Factor increased 63% to 2.963, moving 37 places up within its Clinical Neurology sector. The Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care also moved up 13 places with a 27.9% Impact Factor increase to 2.205.

Other titles that registered impressive Impact Factor performances were: Cancer Investigation, with an increased impact factor of 2.105; Autoimmunity at 2.813; Critical Reviews in Microbiology with 3.207; Leukemia & Lymphoma at 2.397; and Nanotoxicology which registered a 72.5% increase to 5.774.

“Our overall performance – together with the outstanding individual performances of many of our titles – ensures that Informa continues to serve as a leading force in medical and scientific publishing, providing the market with the lion’s share of must-read titles,” explains Phil.

*© Thomson Reuters, Journal Citation Reports® 2010

Computational Sciences in Drug Metabolism and Toxicology

This month Expert Opinion on Drug Metabolism and Toxicology is proud to introduce its first themed issue, focusing on Computational Sciences in Drug Metabolism and Toxicology.

Computational chemistry and bioinformatics have gained considerable importance in the pharmaceutical field to the extent that they are now integrated and indispensable to any R&D programme. This is particularly relevant in drug metabolism and toxicology studies, where in silico methods hold the potential to reduce the attrition rate throughout the drug development cycle and improve regulatory productivity and quality through faster, cheaper and better informed decision making.

Guest Edited by Dr Luis Valerio Jr., an internationally recognized expert in this topic, this issue is very unique and explores, among regulatory perspectives and reviews by leading experts, the variety of approaches in the field, their usage and development. Most importantly, it also stresses the limits of the tools and the need for their thorough understanding, testing and validation before implementation. In his free editorial, Dr Valerio Jr details the coverage of each article, and points out how these tools are evidence-based and represent an integrated science.

I hope you will find the articles insightful and thought provoking.

Joris Roulleau
Senior Editor

GPR119 agonists for the treatment of type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is the most common form of diabetes, already affecting millions of people worldwide, with cases expected to rise significantly in the future. Given some of the unpleasant and sometimes dangerous side effects of current anti-diabetic therapies, which include hypoglycaemia, gastrointestinal problems, weight gain and edema, there is ongoing research to find more promising targets that can effectively reduce blood glucose. One target that has gained considerable interest is GPR119, a G-protein coupled receptor. Agonists of this receptor have been shown to increase both glucose –dependent insulin release and incretin release (which, in turn, causes insulin release). Jones and colleagues review currently known chemical GPR119 agonists focusing on the chemical structure of the compounds and discuss their effects in animal models of diabetes and early clinical trials. The authors claim GPR119 agonists could be used effectively with DPP-IV inhibitors to control glucose levels if their actions can be repeated in human clinical trials.

Informa Healthcare redesigns website, adds book content

Informahealthcare.com offers improved navigation with new look and ability to search across journals and books

Informa Healthcare – one of the world’s leading medical and scientific publishers¬ – has unveiled plans to redesign and add recently published book content to the informahealthcare.com web platform. The change is set to go live in July 2010, when the site will deliver more than 170 journals and approximately 600 online books. The combination of books and journals allows users to search across both products to find key data on one platform – saving researchers time and helping site administrators track usage more effectively.

The redesigned site will improve navigation and optimize current functionality. Enhancements include:

• Deeper content in special therapeutic areas including cardiology, dermatology, neurology, pharmaceutical science, respiratory medicine, toxicology, and urology
• Option to save searches to help manage advanced research results
• Improved navigation options to highlight most popular articles and chapters, share journal or book developments and connect related content or authors to improve and expand research
• More links to key resources such as audio or video content, social networking pages, users guides, and the Informa Healthcare blog to diversity product offerings and maximize subscription investments

“Adding more electronic content from our recently published books will offer our customers more research and opinion within specific therapeutic areas,” said Phil Garner, Divisional Managing Director, Informa Healthcare. “With additional links to video content and our ability to search across journals or books, we’ll be able to deliver a richer online experience to our customers.”

The new platform also allows librarians, information officers or department heads to evaluate usage and traffic on the site to ensure their patrons or staff are regularly accessing the data and help quantify subscription investments. As administrators, customers can access COUNTER-compliant usage reports, manage IP ranges, and view general account details. Users can also receive new data published online through free alerts services – including eTOC alerts, early online article alerts or RSS feeds to share any research or developments with peers.

Informahealthcare.com covers all aspects of healthcare—including drug discovery and development, medical technology, bioscience, clinical medicine and toxicology—offering access to specialized research and insight from an international body of experts. The site will now offer more than 3 million pages of research and approximately 16,000 new book chapters. Content will continue to increase as new issues and books are added.

For more information, visit http://informahealthcare.com.

10 years of Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy

Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy is now in its 10th volume! In the foreword to the first volume, J. Desmond Fitzgerald stated that “the broader field of biologic therapy has only come of age in the last 20 years but now is poised to make a major impact on therapeutics.” We now look back over the last 10 years’ manuscripts in EOBT and are struck by how complex this transition into therapeutic application has been and how EOBT has provided the expert commentary that distills, explains, and prioritizes the issues involved, highlighting the most promising technologies and, frequently, identifying the technologies that may seem to be “outside the box’ but which could also represent new strategies for managing difficult-to-treat medical conditions. Illustrating the complexity in development and approval of biologics are the many reports on cancer vaccines. These articles point out how the success of clinical trials of immunotherapy for cancer will require further understanding of the ideal patient groups, immune correlates, and most appropriate clinical endpoints. The reporting on the development of dendritic cell vaccines for prostate cancer including Provenge and DCVax illustrates excellent commentary on these complex issues. Now Provenge stands at the threshold of an approval decision by FDA which would make it the first true anti-cancer vaccine to be approved. Therapeutic antibodies have continued to expand in number and range of targets. This is most apparent in the most recent issue of EOBT with reviews of antibodies against targets as diverse as folate receptor α, CD80, and RANK-ligand. Another area that has continued to gain momentum is that of stem cell therapy and it is expected that the next ten years will see this used more routinely as a therapeutic option for diverse medical conditions. Finally, glimpses of the future are suggested by manuscripts describing strategies for creating vascular structures to support development of new organs. While the ability to generate new tissue to replace damaged organs and structures routinely may be far in the future, we see the first glimpses of this possibility now 10 years into EOBTs coverage of biologic therapy.

Dr Michael Morse
Editor-in-Chief

Celebrating the 20 years of Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents

This month celebrates the 20th anniversary of Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents. Behind this slightly esoteric title, EOTP has for two decades offered a bird’s eye view of the latest advances in the discovery of therapeutically promising molecules. During this period the scientific and regulatory landscapes in drug R&D inevitably evolved, the number of peer-reviewed publications worldwide increased steadily and the Expert Opinion journals changed hands. Yet, I think it is fair to say that EOTP’s distinct approach and relevance have remained unaltered.

Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents’ launch aimed at filling a gap in the life science literature by explicitly including patents within the scope of its review articles. Key to a legal system designed to promote innovation, patents provide exclusive rights to the inventor in return for the full disclosure of the invention to the public. In the specific context of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, this makes patents a particularly valuable source of information for medicinal chemists and other researchers involved in drug discovery. In effect, to protect their promising compounds, companies reveal them at an early preclinical stage and for the first time in patents. Not only do patents divulge the novel compounds, but they also show which are deemed to show clinical potential and offer insights into the competitors’ research programmes.

Patents are not alien to researchers in the industry. However, despite being largely freely available and easily searchable, patents present the information in a somewhat cryptic way. They don’t follow the rules of scientific writing and extracting the relevant knowledge can be time consuming. Patents are long documents worded in legal jargon by specialist attorneys. They often cover dozens of compounds, only a few of which are of genuine interest. These compounds need to be reconstructed from generic structures and of course, they need to be put into context with other related patents as well as the scientific literature.

EOTP’s review articles provide a dramatic shortcut to the essential information by summing up the important scientific content of dozens of patents, putting it into a wider perspective and, of course, expressing the authors’ own critical opinion. They answer fundamental questions such as “what are the structural types of inhibitors? “ and “who are the major players in the field?,” but also go beyond and suggest which compounds are likely to progress to the clinic. In that respect, Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents’ reviews offer exceptional added value.

I know from many first-time authors that preparing a manuscript for the journal is a surprisingly taxing undertaking. I can but acknowledge this and I would like to thank our authors for their hard work. The constant increase in EOTP’s usage testifies that the drug discovery community clearly values such efforts. Moreover, the readership is very likely to continue to grow as EOTP has eventually been accepted for indexing on Medline last year – an unfortunately tardy development.

Last year, Expert Opinion’s editorial team gathered feedback from the advisory boards and our readers. This 20th volume of EOTP should reap the first benefits of this consultation. First, the abstract’s structure has been redesigned to better reflect the content of the article. Second, an ‘article highlights’ box has been added to guide the reader through the main points of the paper. Third, EOTP will start publishing one to two themed issues in each volume. The first one, guest-edited by Dr Herbert Kirst from our Editorial Board, will cover antibacterials and will be due later this year.

I expect in 2010 the acceleration of another more gradual addition to the journal. The biotechnologies are now fully integrated to the pharmaceutical area and bear novel promises of therapeutic advances. Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents will logically increase its coverage of biologicals to echo this trend.
I hope this agenda meets our readers’ expectations and that EOTP will remain, above all, a useful resource to professionals in the field.

Joris Roulleau
Senior Editor