Positive feedback drives network (and manuscript) maturation.

Whole-brain anatomical mapping of D1-Cre expression in inhibitory neurons (from Supp Fig.2)

It really is an embarrassment of riches here at Nature these days, what with so many excellent neuroscience-related studies emerging. Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had the following studies:

So really, a lot to write about from a science perspective. However, this blog is dedicated to bringing you the editorial back-story, so I wanted to touch on yet another interesting study, published in print today. This new paper offers an opportunity to discuss an important editorial issue: the manuscript appeal process. For more details, you can always read the appropriate section in our guide to authors. But it’s often helpful to follow a particular [successful] example in order to illustrate the process. Continue reading

Pulling back the editorial curtain on Nature’s papers

After a brief resurrection during the 2012  Society for Neuroscience meeting, the time has come to get a more regular series going on the old Action Potential blog! There are a lot of great (neuro)science writers out there (just to name a few,) so here at Nature, we wanted to be able to offer something different, something unique to supplement your weekly intake of neuroscience knowledge. Therefore, my editorial colleague I-han Chou and I will regularly blog about the latest neuro papers we publish in the journal, with particular attention to the back stories and our reasoning for offering publication.

Every paper has a story and this will be your opportunity to hear them. We’ll be discussing why we believe a particular paper is a potential game-changer, why we highlighted a technical advance with no biological insight, how two papers with similar findings were co-published and when possible, we will also be inviting commentary from the authors themselves or critical experts in the field to provide balance on the issue of novelty and the future importance of a finding.

We hope you’ll enjoy this series and we’ll try to post something 1-2 times a week, depending on the scheduling of neuroscience publications. On slower weeks, we may re-visit past papers that have a particularly interesting story or lesson. You are free to also make suggestions on coverage (new and old papers.) You can always comment below or use the contact information in the “About this Blog” section.

Finally, for additional coverage, please make sure to bookmark the RSS feed (if you still use that,) circle the Action Potential Google+ Page, circle I-han or myself on G+ and follow I-han or myself on Twitter and let this experimental journey begin…