In 2000, before the World Wide Web was a mainstay of modern life, Lloyd J. Old, M.D., CRI’s founding scientific and medical director, saw the potential of this powerful new tool to revolutionize scientific publishing. As a vehicle for rapid, widespread, and inexpensive dissemination of knowledge, the Internet could not only provide a portal for investigators to publish and access data, but also serve as a key bridge between scientists and the public.
With this innovative vision, in March 2001, Cancer Immunity launched, becoming not only one of the first scientific journals to provide its content openly, without charging subscription fees, but also—and still—as one of the only to do so at no charge to authors.
Cancer Immunity was innovative then, and it remains so today. With recent changes, it is now also poised to make even more significant contributions to the field going forward. Most notably, in 2012 Cancer Immunity—originally the journal of the Academy of Cancer Immunology (ACI) and sponsored jointly by CRI and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR)—was adopted as the official journal of the Cancer Research Institute.
With this, we provide Cancer Immunity as a resource for all of CRI’s constituencies—not only the ACI, but also members of our Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium, our Scientific Advisory Council, investigators in the CRI/Ludwig Cancer Vaccine Collaborative, current and past postdoctoral fellows, clinical investigators, and others—and invite them to be actively involved with the journal by contributing and reviewing papers, taking advantage of the journal’s many online resources, and participating in Cancer Immunity’s online community.
Cancer Immunity supports CRI’s mission by giving our researchers and the field as a whole a vehicle not only to openly publish their results, but to immediately and freely access the results of others, accelerating the transfer of knowledge and the pace of research. This represents a completely new step in CRI’s programmatic history, enabling us to better facilitate scientific exchange, accelerate research, and, ultimately, further the development of new immunotherapies for cancer patients.