Category Archives: In the News

The Latest Research on Cancer and Hair

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A recent study has made the news by showing a correlation between hair products including dye and straighteners and an increased risk for breast cancer. Over a six-year period, it found that hair dye use was associated with 45% higher breast cancer risk in black women and 7% higher risk in white women. Dr. Larry Norton, medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at MSK was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “You cannot, based on these data, make the statement that hair dyes and straighteners cause breast cancer” and that “these effects were small.”

While this study does not show a direct causal link between breast cancer and hair products, there is other interesting research related to cancer and hair. Recently, researchers including Dr. Mario E. Lacouture (Director of the MSK Oncodermatology Program) have studied how cancer treatment can adversely affect cancer patients hair.

Dr. Mario E. Lacouture. Source: Robert A. Lisak.

While most people are familiar with hair loss during chemotherapy, cancer treatments have been shown to contribute to a range of hair disorders. Researchers are now beginning to investigate how these hair disorders can affect cancer patients’ quality of life.

What’s the deal with Article Processing Charges (APCs)?

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If you have published an article in a hybrid open access or fully open access journal, chances are you have paid an Article Processing Charge (APC), also known as “Author Processing Charge” or “Article Processing Fee.” Here are some frequently asked questions about APCs:

What exactly are APCs?
Manchester Metropolitan University Library in the United Kingdom defines APCs as “the fee that publishers of some open access journals charge in order to publish articles.”

What types of journals charge APCs?
Fully open access (OA) journals (where all of the articles published by the journal are immediately freely-available to readers upon publication) usually require authors to pay an APC. Hybrid open access journals (a journal that makes content available via a mixture of traditional subscription-based publishing and open access), on the other hand, only require a fee from authors who purposely select the OA option. As such, readers – and libraries – still have to pay for access (via subscription or otherwise) to the non-open access content of hybrid OA journals.

A 2016 JISC report report analyzed APCs at institutions across the UK and found that the majority of APCs are paid to hybrid journals. Hybrid APC pricing is higher on average than full open access journals, but the average APC of fully OA journals is rising more quickly than APCs for hybrid journals.  

Figure 11: Hybrid/Full OA expenditure August 2014-July 2015. From Shamash, K., 2016. Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Subscriptions. Monitoring Open Access Costs. Bristol: Jisc. Used with permission.

How much are APCs?
APC costs vary by journal title and by publisher. A 2017 JISC study found that APCs across 14 UK institutions was £1737 in 2015 (about $2,100 USD) while this 2014 study found that the average hybrid APC was $2,727 USD, and the average fully OA journal APC was between $1,418 and $2,097 USD. Some APCs are as high as $5,000 USD. Elsevier has an online price list that displays several journals with an APC over $5,000 USD.

Has the cost of APCs gone up?
One study found that the average price of APCs by European institutions was €858 in 2005 and grew to €1600 in 2018, meaning prices nearly doubled. The amount of APCs paid is rising yearly, and the average APC is outpacing inflation.

The chart below shows that inflation as reported by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics or the European Central Bank would only have increased the 2005 APC to a 2018 APC of €1100 and €1046, respectively, not €1600. This is an increase three times higher than what would be expected based on present economic conditions.

Figure 1. Article processing charges paid (mean±SEM, €) by European institutions between 2005 and 2018 compared to the 2005 fee indexed according to inflation in the United States (Consumer Price Index) and Europe (Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices). Data from OpenAPC as of 31 March 2019. From Khoo, S., 2019. Article processing charge hyperinflation and price insensitivity: An open access sequel to the serials crisis. Liber Quarterly, 29(1). Used with permission.

What do APCs pay for?
According to publishers like Springer, APCs cover costs related to technical infrastructure and innovation, production of articles, marketing, customer service, and editorial work (not including the work of peer reviewers, which is unpaid).

Publishers also follow the principles of ‘prestige pricing’ or ‘status consumption’ – wherein a desire for prestige motivates consumers, or in this case authors, to pay higher prices for goods, in this case publications, that confer status. For example, Elsevier lists “journal quality” and “journal competitiveness” as factors that drive APC pricing.

Who pays for APCs?
There are a number of mechanisms for APC payment, as shown by this 2014 study. Authors often pay for APCs out of their individual grant funds or may pay using central funds managed by their institution and supported by funding agencies. Institutions may also prepay through membership schemes like discounts, and often such arrangements take place through libraries.

Does MSK Library offer support for APCs?
Yes. Please see the Library’s Open Access LibGuide and click on the “Info for MSK Authors” tab to find  “MSK Paid Membership and Other OA Discounts” to learn more about APC discounts for individual journals. Additionally, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Open Access Publication (SKOAP) Fund is an initiative to support open access to scholarly publishing.The SKOAP Fund will underwrite reasonable article processing fees for open access journals when financial support is not otherwise available. Reimbursement for article-processing fees must meet fund requirements.

Interpreting Medicine

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A recent article in Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News highlights the need for translation services in healthcare settings.

Dr. Lisa Diamond

Dr. Lisa Diamond. Photo by Richard DeWitt.

As MSK’s Dr. Lisa Diamond explains in the piece, physician familiarity with a language does not mean the doctor can communicate medical concepts with a patient in that idiom. By law, health care providers must offer professional language services to patients in need of them. But too often, translation comes from well-intentioned but untrained staff or a patient’s family members.

Dr. Diamond and colleagues published a study in 2016 in which they analyzed surgeons’ use of interpreters at a medical center in Boston. Although this hospital has a robust interpreter service, if the wait time for an interpreter were longer than 15 minutes surgeons were more likely to use their non-English language skills or a patient’s family members, including children, as interpreters.

In the Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News article, Dr. Diamond offers one potential solution: an opt-out, rather than an opt-in system, for interpreter services. This would require language preferences to be recorded in a patient’s health record so that every patient in need of interpretation had an interpreter assigned to them.

Learn more about MSK’s Language Assistance Program.