Congratulations on your faculty position at a newly established college! You think you know what the job entails: teaching, research, and some administrative service. As you read job advice, you wonder why so many pieces include the phrase “survival tips.” “Surviving” was your most-commonly-used word during your PhD and postdoc. Surely, there‘s no more surviving to be had in a brand new college?
By Paul Smaglik
This is the first of three guest blogs we’re featuring from the chief editors of three newly-launched journals: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. (Read the announcement from Nature Research here).
This blog comes from Luke Batchelor, the Chief Editor of Communications Chemistry. Previously, Luke was a Team Manager at Nature Communications. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from The University of Manchester, and performed post-doctoral work at Université Paris Sud XI.
Luke Batchelor
A common complaint amongst scientists that I speak to is that there is simply too much literature to keep on top of, and so as we announce three new community-focused open-access journals I think it is important to talk about what we intend to achieve at Communications Chemistry and to explain the benefits we hope to provide for our authors and readers.
While this post focuses on chemistry, the teams developing the three journals have been working closely together and many of these sentiments are equally applicable to the sister journals – Communications Biology and Communications Physics.
Communications Chemistry will be a selective journal, publishing what we hope will be significant advances within any area of chemistry. And while the journal itself will cover a broad scope, we would not require that an individual paper is of broad interest. We will be happy to publish interesting work that may only be of relevance to smaller groups of researchers that target specific problems.
We are aware of the importance of rapid dissemination of new work, particularly in highly competitive fields. As such, if your work is not accepted for publication in another Nature Research journal (Nature Communications, for example) we will be making the process of transferring your manuscript and any associated reviewers reports to Communications Chemistry as efficient as possible.
While our peer-review process will be as rigorous as any other Nature Research journal, and we will be adhering to all of the same publishing and ethical policies, our editors and staff are committed to streamlining the peer-review and publication process at every step.
As an open-access journal, publishing under the unrestrictive CC-BY licence, your work will be available to be widely shared and read by anyone. The journal will be hosted alongside the rest of Nature Research’s portfolio link on nature.com, which attracts over nine million unique visitors per month.
We see ourselves as a journal for the chemistry community, and as such we will be striving to work closely with the researchers that make up our authors and readership. In part this will be through our shared editorial model, which combines the editorial experience of in-house editors with the technical expertise and day-to-day research involvement of practising scientists. Our editors will make themselves available at conferences, lab visits and via social media to discuss individual papers or publishing in more general terms, and we are looking at initiatives which we hope will allow us to give back to the community in other ways.
Communications Chemistry is now open for submissions. I invite you to visit our website for more information.
My editors and I also look forward to working with you if you choose to publish your research with Communications Chemistry.
For queries about the journal, please contact commschem@nature.com.
For news from our new Communications journals, follow us on Twitter: @commsbio, @commchem, @commsphys.
Applications for two grant schemes open on 3 August, including ‘Starting’ grants of up to €1.5 million for up to 5 years for PIs who earned their PhD within 2-7 years ago; and a new collaborative programme, the ‘Synergy’ grant, which will fund 2-4 PIs in a cross-disciplinary project. The Synergy scheme, which awards up to €10 million for 6 years, was piloted in 2012 and 2013. The deadline is 17 October for Starting grant applications and 14 November for Synergy applications.
Applications for ‘Proof of Concept’ grants will be accepted starting in September, and for ‘Consolidator’ grants starting in October.
The 2018 grant programme will collectively fund about 900 PIs and is estimated to support 6,000 PhD students, postdocs and other lab members. ERC’s grant-success rate is 10-15%.
To apply for a Starting grant, click here . For a Synergy grant application, click here. Good luck!
Please note that on 25 July 2017 the @naturejobs Twitter account was hacked. We are working to rectify the situation. Any views currently expressed on this account since it became compromised do not reflect the views of Naturejobs.
In this month’s editorial, we visit the topic of red to near infrared fluorescent probes for use in fluorescence microscopy, with special emphasis on imaging live specimens. The topic was inspired by a Commentary from Laissue and colleagues in this issue on the topic of assessing and reporting phototoxicity during live imaging.
As additional reading, we suggest a 2013 editorial on phototoxicity from our pages.
We welcome any feedback!
From June 14-17, scientists convened in Boston for the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). Here is the browsable program.
In advance of the meeting, we had the opportunity to chat with Sally Temple, president of ISSCR, co-founder and scientific director of the Neural Stem Cell Institute and Lorenz Studer, founder and director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to hear about some of the sessions but also to learn about some larger trends shaping the stem cell biology field.
Here is a video (19 minutes).
And here is a podcast of this conversation, both moderated by Tal Nawy, a senior editor at Nature Methods.
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