For past and future authors of Nature Publishing Group Journals
When the community is overburdened by peer review, it's everybody's problem. As of today, Nature Neuroscience has become part of the solution by joining the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, a flexible system that allows voluntary participation by authors, referees and editors. Here are more details, from our April editorial:
Continue reading "NN Joins Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium" »
If anyone has happened to check the “About the Editors” section on our webpage, you may have noticed that I am in the midst of my second stint at the journal. I worked here back in 2001 in between completing a master’s degree in the UK and a PhD at MIT, and then returned this year while I looked into postdoc options. I will be leaving at the end of January to start a postdoc in Andrew Oxenham’s lab at the University of Minnesota, and so the journal is looking for someone to take my place.
I would encourage anyone considering alternatives to the standard academic career in science to think about applying. I have enjoyed my time here tremendously and highly recommend the position.
I get asked all the time what it’s like to be an editor. The primary duties involve reading and evaluating manuscripts. Over 70% of submitted papers are rejected without review, and reading the submissions and then making those calls is one of the main responsibilities. Once a decision is made to send a paper out for review, you have to choose appropriate reviewers, and once the reviews are in, you have to come to a decision on what to do with the paper. Other responsibilities include commissioning and editing News and Views pieces and review articles, writing press releases, and attending scientific meetings. So there is not that much editing in the traditional sense of the word, although it is a component of the job. The job mostly involves thinking critically about science.
I really enjoy the work, so much so that I came back to work for the journal a second time. One of my favorite aspects of the job is that you get to be very broad, reading papers from quite a large expanse of the field. It’s quite different from scientific research, where typically we focus on very particular problems for long periods of time. You stay up to date on the entire field and continually learn new things. It’s also very different from research in that the rewards are more immediate. Every decision you make has tangible short-term consequences, and matters to a lot of people. Because the editorial decisions are so important to the people involved, and to the community at large, it’s easy to get excited about the day to day activities on the job. You are also constantly exposed to cutting edge work, sometimes being the first to hear about it. And you spend a lot of time talking with scientists, so you stay close to the research world even though you are not doing primary research.
The main official requirement is a PhD in neuroscience. My background is in the higher end of the field, but someone with molecular or cellular training would be equally welcome.
If you think you might be interested, you should submit a CV and cover letter to admin@natureny.com, and cc the editor in chief, Sandra Aamodt, at s.aamodt@natureny.com. If you have any questions about what is involved feel free to email me as well.
Today was the fourth day of SFN 2006, and I find myself seriously frustrated with the setup of the meeting this year - there seems to have been little to no thought put into where to schedule the various concurrent sessions. Usually there are multiple slide sessions each morning or afternoon that are of interest. The natural thing to do is to skip back and forth between sessions to catch the most interesting talks, but here in Atlanta this is all but impossible given the distance separating even closely related sessions. The Atlanta convention center consists of three connected buildings, each of which has multiple levels connected with escalators. It takes a good 10 minutes to walk from Building B to Building C, and yet sessions that are fairly similar in focus are routinely allocated to different buildings. On Sunday the session on objects and faces (mostly fMRI of the ventral pathway) was in B and one on extrastriate visual cortex was in C, as was a session on attention. No doubt most of the people interested in one of these sessions would have been interested in the others, and yet it was all but impossible to go back and forth. This has happened to me every day thusfar. Many of the scientists here have expressed a similar frustration. The problem would be easy to remedy - someone just needs to put related sessions in nearby rooms. The room assignments, as far as I can tell, are totally random, which has detracted from the meeting.
This afternoon featured a well attended talk on the current funding woes, given by the heads of the various agencies of the NIH (the NIH director was supposed to give it, but his flight was delayed). The talk focused on explaining why we are currently experiencing a funding crunch in the US, and attempted to highlight what the NIH folks say are widespread misconceptions about NIH funding. The increased competition for funds has apparently been mostly driven by an increase in grant applications (rather than a funneling of resources to more clinically oriented research), fuled in part by a boom investments in the biomedical sciences by universities. New facilities have brought with them new jobs, and there are now many more people applying for grants. NIH funding doubled between 1998 and 2002, but has leveled off since then, so supply has not kept pace with demand. Tom Insel stressed that they are still committed to basic research; apparently the proportion of directly translational research they fund has not increased. He did not address the issue that most of the scientists I know are interested in - whether basic research grants need to explain how the research might ultimately benefit human health in some way. There was a Q&A session at the end that I had to skip out on, so perhaps someone queried him about this. They did offer some encouragement, citing previous periods when funding dried up and funding rates were as low as 10%, and explaining how grants that are ending now will free up uncommitted funds for new grants. They also concluded by stating the need to better explain the importance of the NIH to the public (apparently only 10% even know what the NIH is).
The most striking news for me at the (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing session yesterday was that fewer than 100 people showed up, even though prominent posters advertising the discussion greeted all attendees on their way into the meeting. I guess neuroscience journal editors are going to have to figure out how to navigate the brave new world of scientific publishing without much help from readers.
For those of you who haven’t been following the debate, there are a couple of linked hot-button issues that publishers have been dealing with over the last few years. One is whether journal content should be available to anyone (open access) or only to subscribers or site license users. Another is how journals should make the transition from print to web publication, which includes the question of who’s going to pay for our work once journals move away from print subscriptions as a major revenue source. (If you doubt that journal editors add value by publishing your work, ask yourself why you don’t just post a description of the experiment on your own website and skip all that pesky peer review hassle.) Like the rest of us, the editors of the Journal of Neuroscience are trying to figure out how to keep the community happy and the journal sustainable at the same time, and this session was their attempt to bring society members into the conversation.
The panel included people from the American Physical Society, the librarian organization SPARC, Science magazine, Highwire Press, Elsevier and PNAS. We heard some cautionary tales – when PNAS tried making their content freely available after one month in 2000, they had an 11% drop in subscriptions, and when the APS tried asking high-energy physicists to pay for publication in the early 1990s, many of them stopped submitting their work to the journal. But there were also some success stories, including several journals at which authors or third parties can pay to make articles free online at publication. At PNAS, about 20% of authors take this option. Donald Kennedy of Science emphasized that his journal is available to virtually all scientists through site licenses, though Andrew Watson, who edits the open-access Journal of Vision, challenged that view in the question period, calling the discussion “too nice”. He had a point: I’m not sure that someone unfamiliar with the debate would have been able to determine which panelists disagreed with each other on what issues.
Today I spent part of the afternoon at the Nature booth that the company has set up here at the meeting. Lots of people dropped by, some to chat about their interest in getting involved in editing, others to talk about their papers, and still others with general questions about the way things work behind the scenes. One question I get asked a lot is whether there is any way to tell if a paper that you've just written is something that Nature Neuroscience would be interested in publishing. I can certainly rattle off a list of traits that tend to characterize papers published in high profile journals, but I don't know how helpful that is. One thing that has become clear to me in my own experiences writing papers, and in talking to authors, is that it is extremely difficult to objectively evaluate one's own work. When you've spent a year or two conducting experiments and then writing them up, it is quite hard to step back and get a sense of how important or interesting the work is to a broad audience. Partially because of this, we do offer authors the option of submitting a Presubmission Inquiry to gauge the journal's interest in a potential submission. This is easy to do, but the effectiveness of this depends critically on writing a useful description of the work. Quite often authors will describe the work in very abstract terms, or mainly describe the conclusions that they have drawn from the work, rather than what experiments were conducted. The most useful thing for an editor is to get a concise description of the science that was done, as well as it's motivation and a brief statement of what is learned from it. For us to give useful feedback about whether the work is likely to be appropriate for the journal, the abstract should not be too abstract.
The evening brought the annual MIT Picower party. This year it was held at a large club in the Midtown area of Atlanta, and was totally packed. I would say there were well upwards of 1000 people in attendance, talking, drinking and dancing. Attendance was tilted towards the younger end of the SFN attendee spectrum, but there were quite a few faculty in attendance as well. When I left at around 1 things showed no signs of slowing down...
One important thing I get out of this meeting is the opportunity to talk with scientists about how the journal is doing and what we might improve. People seem generally happy with the papers that we’re publishing, but I’ve gotten a lot of interesting suggestions too.
The most controversial one was that we should publish the reviews of accepted papers (anonymously) online. Some people loved this idea, saying that reviews contain a wealth of information, from the reasons that the referees found the work exciting to the potential limitations of the authors’ approach, which would be especially helpful to scientists reading papers outside their field. Another potential advantage would be to make the editorial decision process more transparent to readers. Knowing that the reviews would be posted might also influence referees to write them more carefully and do a better job of citing references to document their concerns about novelty or conceptual advance.
The naysayers are equally passionate, telling me that posting reviews would place an additional burden on the referees, making them more reluctant to review and probably leading them to express their opinions less candidly. People worry that allowing a large number of readers to see the reviews might increase the odds of someone identifying a referee. One scientist said that editors would be dodging their responsibilities by posting the reviews online, making it look like we were trying to shift the blame for the decision onto the referees. Others note that many flaws identified during the review process will have been fixed by the time the paper is published, so the criticisms raised by referees are no longer relevant.
I’m sympathetic to these concerns. Of course we would never post reviews without the permission of the affected authors and referees, and I don’t advocate making it a regular habit for all accepted papers. On the other hand, I can imagine that it would be helpful to readers in certain cases. It will be a while before we decide whether to try it, but in the meantime, I’d be interested in your opinions on the subject.
I flew in Thursday night for the Friday auditory physiology satellite meeting organized by Xiaoqin Wang and Yale Cohen. It was an interesting meeting - in addition to posters and morning talks on new research findings, an afternoon session was focused exclusively on methods. A wide range of auditory neurophysiologists gave 10 minute slide presentations of training techniques and the details of their preps. It is widely acknowledged that training animals on auditory tasks tends to be harder than training them on visual tasks, which I think made everyone inclined to share tips and techniques.
Today brought the start of the main meeting. I also missed Gehry's talk, but made it to the visual coding session, which featured some nice talks. The poster session was, as always, more about running into people than about absorbing many new results, but for me that is one of the best things about this meeting. You run into everyone...
Some of you have (hopefully) noticed that our October issue is fatter than normal, with a special focus on childhood developmental disorders. Four specially commissioned perspectives in this issue explore dyslexia, autism, specific language impairment and Fragile X syndrome, as well as the commonalities between these disorders and the overlap between normal and abnormal development. This is a large and often somewhat contentious field, but we hope that these articles stimulate thought and act as a spur for further research. Thanks to our sponsors, the content of the article is freely available through December 2006 here. Here are the links to the individual articles which make up this focus:
From genes to behavior in developmental dyslexia
Time to give up on a single explanation for autism
Fragile X syndrome and autism at the intersection of genetic and neural networks
What developmental disorders can tell us about the nature and origins of language
Let us know what you think of the focus! We'd love to hear your thoughts on these articles, and on this topic.
Dong et al., CREB modulates excitability of nucleus accumbens neurons
Adler et al., UNC-6/Netrin induces neuronal asymmetry and defines the site of axon formation
Priebe and Ferster, Mechanisms underlying cross-orientation suppression in cat visual cortex
As always, comments welcome!
Demonstrations by animal rights activists are unfortunately nothing new, but there was an interesting demonstration last weekend in Oxford, UK. This one also had lots of placard waving about animal research, catchy slogans, and yes, a strong police presence. The message however was very different: this was actually a demonstration in favor of animal testing.
Hundreds of people marched in support of a new biomedical lab, set to be built in the University of Oxford’s Science area. Work on the facility has been set back because of threats from animal rights activist, and protests against the lab are a familiar sight for anyone who lives and works in Oxford. But this is the first time that there has been a demonstration in favor of the lab, and it is being seen as a reaction to growing indignation over the extreme tactics being used by some animal rights activists.
Most interestingly, this demonstration was not organized by scientists, but by a 16 year old student, Laurie Pycroft, who was unhappy with the one-sided public debate on this issue. He created a research advocacy website catchily called Pro-test, and went on to organize the march. Though there were plenty of scientists who spoke at the demonstration (as well as the local member of parliament), the mobilizing force behind this march seem not to be scientists. Animal rights activists have been far more successful in arguing their case to the general public, and this is partly because few researchers want to risk the kind of concentrated campaigns which have been carried out against the handful of researchers who have spoken for animal research (and Laurie himself is now a target ). Groups like Pro-test suggest that some of the messages from the scientific community are getting through, and the chance for a more open debate is welcomed.
Four new Nature Neuroscience articles were published online yesterday. Check them out, and as always, we'd be glad to have your feedback.
Kholmanskikh et al., Calcium-dependent interaction of Lis1 with IQGAP1 and Cdc42 promotes neuronal motility
Sato et al., DWnt4 regulates the dorsoventral specificity of retinal projections in the Drosophila melanogaster visual system
Sugino et al., Molecular taxonomy of major neuronal classes in the adult mouse forebrain
Urushitani et al., Chromogranin-mediated secretion of mutant superoxide dismutase proteins linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
The December issue of Nature Neuroscience includes a special focus on computational and systems neuroscience highlighting research presented at the Cosyne meeting held this past March in Salt Lake City.
We think that combining theoretical and experimental approaches to studying neuroscience can be a tremendously fruitful approach to studying the brain. In a departure from our usual focus format, this special includes not only commissioned Perspectives, but also primary research articles that we think highlight the value of applying theory to empirical approaches.
Every one of the papers in the focus was subjected to our normal peer review process, and we applied our usual stringent criteria in making the decision to accept or reject. Each one of the papers and met the criteria for publication in a regular issue of Nature Neuroscience.
We hope you enjoy the focus – let us know what you think.
Neurons in visual cortex respond to all kinds of stimuli - spots, bars, gratings, noise, and photographs of supermodels. Are natural stimuli such as photographs better for figuring out how the visual system works than synthetic stimuli? The computation and systems focus features a pair of Perspectives taking separate sides of this debate. Gidon Felsen and Yang Dan present the benefits of natural stimuli , countered by Nicole Rust and Tony Movshon.
We’ve heard rumblings from the vision community about these two pieces and have received inquiries about opportunities to comment on them – here you are.
Unlike Annette, I’m a relative newcomer to the US of A, and I’m still fairly attached to my old stomping ground in the UK. And there is a knock-down, drag-out battle developing in the newspaper pages there about a scientific issue that I for one had thought was long gone: the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The debate of course goes back to the Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield way back in 1998, which suggested a link between the triple measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism (though the authors were careful to say that they had not established a causal link). This was followed by a precipitous drop in MMR vaccination in the UK, but in 2004, ten of the original co-authors of paper issued a ‘retraction of interpretation’ of the original paper in the face of increasing doubts about the results and the ethical conduct of the study. And a Cochrane review published last month concluded that there was unlikely to be a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which should have put the controversy to bed. Instead, as this well-written article by a parent with child suffering from autism suggests, it has led to resurgence of the whole argument, with salvos by both people against and for the original paper.
Quite apart from the controversy about the MMR-autism link, the whole story raises interesting issues about how science is handled by non-scientists, especially the media: most scientists rejected the idea of the link between MMR and autism, but this was enthusiastically taken up by a lot of British media. Can scientists do a better job of communicating the uncertainties inherent in research? Or as the Bad Science column right in holding the media largely responsible for misreported science? And do you think that there are some areas of neuroscience which are particularly prone to this kind of misreporting?
Following up on interesting things happening at SFN, our chief editor Sandra Aamodt (along with Nature and Nature Reviews Neuroscience editors) gave a talk on Monday on publishing in Nature journals. One of the aims of the talk was to give people a better idea about exactly what happens to a paper once it has been submitted to us. The whole editorial process can sometimes appear to be a bit mysterious, and we are hoping to take away some of the mystery in this talk. Did we succeed? Did you find this talk useful? Feedback welcome!
Drug use and addiction are pervasive. Addiction has very high overall health costs, once related factors such as heart disease, cancer and accidents are considered. The progression from initial drug use to addiction is influenced by the drug, the user's personality, peer influences and environmental stressors. In our November issue, we present a special focus on addiction, highlighting the biology of some of the most commonly abused substances, exploring the genetics of predisposition to addiction, and examining the components of addictive behavior itself.
Our focus consists of reviews and opinion pieces on this topic as well as a commentary on how the neuroscience of addiction should guide public policy and treatment. Thanks to our sponsors, NIDA and NIAAA, this focus is freely available on-line through January 2006. To access the focus, click here.
Let us know what you think of the focus! Are there some reviews or perspectives you enjoyed more than others? How good are our animal models for addiction? What can be done to improve translation of our knowledge of the basic biology of addiction into effective therapies? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this focus, and on this topic!