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®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.