It is no small task to fully rebuild the website of a publication that has 16,118 published articles.
The Cancer Letter has come out every week since 1973, and maintained a web presence since the early days of AOL dialup.
Some of our subscribers may remember getting the printed 8-page issue in the mail every week, hand-stuffed into an envelope by our founder, Jerry D. Boyd (The Cancer Letter, Sept. 27, 2019). A much smaller number might remember the short-lived The Cancer Letter Fax edition, which cost a whopping $274 more per year, adjusted for the cost of long-distance phone time (The Cancer Letter, Jan. 7, 1994).
Our print charm remained after we went fully digital in 2008. We still produced 8-page issues, and we created the PDF edition—reimagined in 2017—that continues to this day. URLs, once we had them, were written out in full. A “documents” page existed on the website where we placed all documents for download that were linked in each issue. Those documents, many of them controversial, will now be annotated and preserved in the Cancer History Project.
Our coverage has evolved since 1973. For one, we became an investigative news publication. Investigations, we have learned, rarely lend themselves to an 8-page format. In 2020, we threw open our doors to guest editorials in a way we never have before and we will not be closing them again. In 2021, we launched the Cancer History Project, setting our sights into the past as well as the future.
At our founding, only two years after the signing of the National Cancer Act, the world was just beginning to see what the field—and the community—could become.
Now, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the National Cancer Act, The Cancer Letter, too, celebrates a new milestone. Our web presence finally reflects the publication we’ve become: a digital-first magazine for the oncology community.
This would be impossible without the years of work by our web developer and database genius, David Koh, and our award-winning designer, Jacqueline Ong. We are in awe of their work, and we hope you will be, too.
We invite you to explore, and we welcome your feedback. Search for your friends and mentors, click around our archives, or just read the latest issue.
What’s new?
IP Login
IP login is now completely automatic. If you used to log in by clicking the “IP Login” button in the menu bar, you’ll find you are already logged in. The site will now automatically log in site license subscribers accessing us from registered IP addresses or VPNs—and you can log in and work and bring it home. Your account will stay logged in for 14 days!
Archives
Every single issue ever published by The Cancer Letter—since 1973—is now available online. We invite you to search for the names of your mentors, or peruse our archive.
Contributors
In 2020, we changed our submission guidelines to throw open the doors to the oncology community. Guest Editorials and Trials & Tribulations became a crucially important forum to the oncology community as researchers compared care and safety guidelines and personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, every contributor has a profile page, and we invite you to join their ranks.
Bug fixes
The account management portal is available to all individual subscribers and resolves some known problems on the old website. If you need to update your billing information, change your password, update your email, or confirm your subscription renewal date, you’ll find the process is much cleaner and easier to navigate.
Subscriptions
Check out our subscription page to learn more about individual subscriptions and site licenses.
Advertising
Our advertising offerings have been reimagined as well. Download our media kit to learn more.
Usage statistics
If you administer a site license subscription, we will now be able to offer much more comprehensive usage statistics.
