About Annals of Lymphoma

Annals of Lymphoma

Overview and identity

Annals of Lymphoma, abbreviated AOL and cited as Ann Lymphoma, is an open-access, international, peer-reviewed electronic journal published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong. It carries online ISSN 2616-2695 and is published at aol.amegroups.org, openly distributed worldwide. The journal was launched in January 2017 and is devoted exclusively to lymphoma, publishing basic and translational science and clinical research on human lymphoma. It continues to volume 10 in 2026.

Exclusivity is the journal's defining claim. Where general haematology and oncology journals cover lymphoma alongside leukaemia, myeloma and solid tumours, Annals of Lymphoma publishes nothing else. Its stated aim, set out at the time of its 2017 partnership announcement, is to provide a forum for the dissemination of original research articles, reviews and perspectives in basic and translational science and clinical research as they relate to human lymphoma, supported by an international editorial board of distinguished specialists who have dedicated their careers to the study of lymphoma in the laboratory and the clinic.

Founding under Bruce D. Cheson

The journal's founding editor-in-chief was Bruce D. Cheson, professor of medicine and head of haematology at Georgetown University Hospital's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, DC. His introduction to the inaugural issue, received on 10 August 2017 and published on 21 August 2017 (doi: 10.21037/aol.2017.08.01), opened the journal's first issue and set out its ambition to build a successful journal dedicated to lymphoma with an international editorial board that, in his words, rivals any in the field.

Cheson brought a specific history to the role. He had chaired the Lymphoma Research Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board from 2010 to 2012, and in the inaugural editorial he described having thought his editing days were over before being approached by Helen Seliman of AME Publishing Company. The editorial was jointly framed with a contribution from Megan Gutierrez, the chief executive of the Lymphoma Research Foundation, foreshadowing the partnership the journal announced the following month. The current editor-in-chief is Mark Roschewski, a senior clinician in the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch of the Center for Cancer Research in Bethesda, Maryland, as recorded on the journal's editorial team page; Roschewski had earlier served the journal as a guest editor, co-editing its follicular lymphoma series, and co-authored an editorial on diversity challenges in follicular lymphoma published in the journal.

The Lymphoma Research Foundation partnership

In September 2017, during Blood Cancer Awareness Month, Annals of Lymphoma entered a partnership with the Lymphoma Research Foundation (LRF), the largest non-profit organisation in the United States devoted exclusively to lymphoma, dedicated to funding innovative lymphoma research and serving the lymphoma community through education programmes, outreach initiatives and patient services. The foundation announced the partnership from New York on 5 September 2017, and both parties described it as a first-of-its-kind arrangement.

The partnership's purpose was communication between communities that rarely share a platform: lymphoma researchers and the patients their work supports. Under it, the journal publishes LRF grant announcements and research results, and the foundation undertook awareness activity with the journal through September and beyond, culminating in Light it Red for Lymphoma on 15 September, World Lymphoma Awareness Day, an LRF initiative in which more than 100 of the world's most recognisable landmarks were lit red in support of blood cancer research. Cheson, quoted in the announcement as editor-in-chief and past chair of the foundation's scientific advisory board, presented the arrangement as establishing more direct lines of communication between the patient and research communities. The journal's announcements page continued to carry LRF material, including the foundation's call for applications for its 2019 Young Investigator Grants, published in June 2018.

Scope across human lymphoma

The journal publishes articles describing advances in basic and translational science and clinical findings relating to human lymphoma. Its areas of interest, listed in the partnership announcement, include epidemiology, biology, genetics, immunology, diagnosis, treatment, and measures of assessment of response. That list spans the whole research cycle of the disease, from population patterns and tumour biology to the response criteria by which trial results are judged.

Published content illustrates both ends of that span. Recent volumes include a study of the IGEV salvage regimen, ifosfamide, gemcitabine, vinorelbine and prednisone, as treatment for relapsed or refractory paediatric classical Hodgkin lymphoma, published in volume 9 in August 2025; a narrative review on the role of pathologic testing in the diagnosis and management of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma; and commissioned series such as the follicular lymphoma series guest edited by Mark Roschewski and Carla Casulo, which included a frontline management review for follicular lymphoma patients (Ann Lymphoma 2021;5:10, doi: 10.21037/aol-20-51). Hodgkin lymphoma regimen studies and case reports form part of its continuing clinical content.

Publication record and annual reports

The journal has published in annual volumes without interruption from volume 1 in 2017 to volume 10 in 2026. It published annual reports for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021, using them to account for its output and development, a habit it shares with few journals of its size. Its article pages display the apparatus of contemporary open-access publishing: PDF full text, reporting checklists, data sharing statements, peer review files and conflict-of-interest forms attached to individual articles, with open-access marking throughout.

Volume numbering and article dates confirm continuing, if modest, output: volume 7 in 2023, volume 8 in 2024 with articles through October of that year, volume 9 in 2025 with articles in June and August, and volume 10 in 2026. The journal is a low-volume specialist title, and its record is one of persistence in a single field rather than growth across fields.

Transparent peer review and COPE

Annals of Lymphoma became a member journal of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in November 2021, a step recorded in its own announcements. It then moved further on transparency than most journals of its size: from 24 March 2023 it fully implemented transparent peer review for all new submissions. Its announcement of that date explains the mechanics precisely. A peer review file, recording reviewer reports and author replies, is included in the footnote of the published article, while the reviewer's identity remains confidential.

The announcement also defines the limits of that transparency. Only the manuscript's peer review history at Annals of Lymphoma is published; referee reports from another journal, if a manuscript was reviewed elsewhere first, remain confidential, as do correspondence between authors and editors, reviewer comments addressed only to the editors, and internal editorial discussions, in order to maintain editorial independence. By accepting a review task, reviewers agree to the anonymous publication of their comments and are notified of this in the reviewer invitation. The journal presented the move as bringing its practice in line with its full open-access policy, citing Nature Communications and Communications Biology as journals that had applied the practice successfully. Earlier, in April 2020, the journal's publisher had entered an official partnership with Publons, the Clarivate service for reviewer recognition, which the journal's announcements also record.

Reporting standards

The journal applies formal reporting standards to its clinical content. Its announcements record the application of the CARE guideline as the reporting standard for case reports in Annals of Lymphoma, and its research articles carry reporting checklists as supplementary material, as visible on its article pages. Articles state their provenance and whether they underwent external peer review, following the convention its commissioned series display: a series article records that it was commissioned by the guest editors and has undergone external peer review, distinguishing commissioned-but-reviewed content from editorials that did not undergo external review.

Authors complete conflict-of-interest forms that are published with the article, and data sharing statements accompany original research. Together with the published peer review files introduced in 2023, these practices make the journal's individual articles unusually well documented for a small electronic title: a reader can inspect not only a paper's checklist and disclosures but the review exchange that preceded its publication.

Readership and role

The journal's readers are the lymphoma community in its two halves: the clinicians and laboratory scientists who research and treat the disease, and, through the Lymphoma Research Foundation connection, the organised patient community that funds and follows that research. Its international editorial board, its United States-based founding and current editors, its Hong Kong publisher and its worldwide open distribution make it a genuinely international title despite its single-disease focus, and its content decisions, from paediatric Hodgkin lymphoma salvage therapy to diversity challenges in follicular lymphoma, reflect the concerns of that international specialty community.

Assessment

Annals of Lymphoma's verified record is distinctive in three ways. It was founded in January 2017 under Bruce D. Cheson with the explicit ambition of a journal dedicated to lymphoma alone. Within its first year it formed a documented, first-of-its-kind partnership with the Lymphoma Research Foundation, the largest United States non-profit devoted exclusively to lymphoma, announced jointly with the foundation in September 2017. And it has since adopted, in sequence, COPE membership in November 2021 and full transparent peer review for all new submissions from March 2023, under its current editor-in-chief Mark Roschewski, while publishing continuously to volume 10 in 2026. Under ISSN 2616-2695, it stands as the lymphoma-only member of the Hong Kong-published AME journal family, and as an example of how a narrow specialist journal can build its identity around a disease community rather than a discipline.