Provisional Cessation of Acceptance of Submissions to the APJCP on June 30th and Transfer of Chief Editor Responsibilities

 Following my last editorial on possible loss of PubMed/MEDLINE listing for the APJCP (Moore, 2016), the APOCP Executive Committee was able to hold a meeting at the 9th Regional Conference in St Petersburg, Russia, June 20th-24th, and a decision was made as to the future of the journal. As of June 30th, I am stepping down as Chief Editor and will only remain as a caretaker until the end of September. This will approximately coincide with my 65th birthday and retirement so that the timing is perhaps appropriate. We will also cease to accept any submissions from the end of June to allow all of the backlog of papers to be safely uploaded onto PubMed before the deadline of October and then my responsibilities for the journal will be completed. Dr Alireza Mosavi-Jarrahi has very kindly offered to take on future responsibilites for the APJCP and with the backing of the Executive Committee will take over as Acting Chief Editor from July 1st. He will endeavour to satisfy the requirements of PubMed/MEDLINE regarding PRESERVATION (Moore, 2016) and will inform the membership of the APOCP of his progress in due course. As soon as the matter is positively resolved he will once again call on the Asian Pacific community of scientists working in cancer control research to submit papers to the new editoral office located in Iran, where his group will take over operations for the APJCP. Dr Xinen Huang, my close friend and colleague, has graciously consented to continue to act as Deputy Chief Editor (and Chinese Chief Editor). After 16 years and 6 months at the helm of the APJCP, so to speak, this is not the way that I had envisaged handing over command to the next Chief Editor and I must apologise to the entire APOCP membership and APJCP readership that I was not more successful in keeping the ship afloat. I still do not understand the rationale behind the decision of PubMed/MEDLINE but, as I stated previously, we must be thankful that we have been indexed under flexible conditions for so long - after all more than 8,300 papers have been listed since we started in 2000, including those in the present issue. That indeed translates into a great deal of education and research infrastructure that we have been able to help establish. While our attempts to promote Asian research have not always been successful   (Moore and Huang, 2015), one could say that a strong argument exists that we have been a beneficial influence in the past (Moore, 2015). I sincerely hope that Dr Mosavi will be able to continue this effort very successfully into the future and ask you all to provide him with the support that he needs in this important task. Of course I will act as a consultant whenever necessary and give him the benefit of my experience and will assist with English language in the Abstracts. In bowing out, I wish to extend my thanks and great appreciation to everyone who has supported the APJCP in the past, including Kazuo Tajima and Shinkan Tokudome who were essential in its infancy, the Japanese National Committee of the UICC, the UICC Regional Office and the Korean National Cancer Center, and especially those individuals who have used its pages for their publications. It always was, and hopefully always will be, your journal in a real sense. Farewell.