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).

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…

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…