Original Vision of the JACMP

Greetings to the JACMP Community! In search of inspiration for my inaugural editorial of my second round as Editor-in-Chief of the JACMP, I looked at some historical documents for guidance. The idea for an open-access journal (that term did not exist at the time) was first discussed as I remember in November of 1997. Ann Wright had mentioned to me, in an almost offhanded way, that it would be very useful to have a standalone clinical medical physics journal, apart from Medical Physics. She was thinking of a print journal, but it occurred to me that the Internet (then only a few years old) would offer a great opportunity to publish a new type of journal — one that did not offer print issues, but would exist only online. The savings of printing and postage would allow for a new type of business model, one that could provide the articles at low or even at no cost to the author and reader. Alex Turner, ACMP Chairman, thought that was an idea that should be explored and appointed a task group to investigate the possibility of a new Journal for Clinical Physics. We had no concept of how difficult and complex it would be to realize this vision, or of the dearth of resources available to proceed. The following is the verbatim initial report of that task group as written in April of 1998. It shows, I believe, that we formulated the kernel of a vision that was later substantially realized, although we did get more than a few things wrong. In 2000, the JACMP became, I believe, the first open-source and open-access academic journal in Radiology and Radiation Oncology, and one of the first such journals in Medicine. Next issue, I will discuss how our vision for the JACMP has evolved over the years, and what we might expect for the future.