For those of you who haven’t noticed, Nature Chemistry is now open for business – our online submission system is up and running…

Such a small sentence, but it is the culmination of a huge effort by a large number of people.

Online submission systems don’t just build themselves, it takes a number of talented individuals to make sure that they are compiled correctly and run smoothly. Many test manuscripts passed through an imaginary peer-review process and were evaluated – not particularly thoroughly – by the likes of Dr Green, Professor Black and Mr Brown. Inboxes were flooded with large numbers of e-mails to make sure the correct message was dispatched under the appropriate circumstances. After all, you don’t want to accept a manuscript when all you actually are trying to do is send someone a message confirming their submission… try getting out of that one!

To coincide with the online submission system going live, we needed to put together a guide to authors. To put together such a document, we needed to sit down as a team and decide what we actually wanted to put in it. What article types do we want? How do we want them submitted? And so on… In addition to the editorial concerns, our production department also cast their eye over the GTA to make sure their requirements were met and then the whole document was copy-edited. If we’re telling you not to make mistakes when compiling your paper, it would be embarrassing if we had mistakes or inconsistencies in the GTA.

That’s still not all though. Web production had to put the GTA on our website and that also involves tweaking the navigation on the site and making sure that all other related sites at NPG now point to the right place. Marketing needed to know when we were going live so that they can get the message out to the wider chemical community and so on….

And so, the manuscripts are starting to arrive – so I probably shouldn’t spend too much time blogging today, I need to go and look up some references. (Although I plan to put up a post in the near future about the choices we made concerning article types).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

It’s been a while, I know, I’m sorry…

So, after counting out which day of our journal journey we’re on, number 179 it turns out, here is another entry in the life of setting up a journal.

At the ACS meeting in New Orleans earlier this year (one I will have a hard time forgetting) we gave away Nature Chemistry labcoats – or at any rate we got people to sign up for a couple of e-alerts and then promised to send them a labcoat. Well, we’ve followed through on that promise and if you were one of those who signed up, either your labcoat should have arrived quite recently, or it will be doing so in the next few days. (I’ve had reports of them turning up in some cases – let us know if yours has arrived by commenting on this post..).

We’ve decided to do the same thing again in Philly at the next ACS meeting – sign up for a couple of e-alerts at the Nature Publishing Group stand at the expo (booth 1815/1817) and we’ll give you a Nature Chemistry labcoat for free. Although it is not confirmed yet, we may even have some stock at the booth and so if you are quick, you might not have to wait to have yours mailed.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to run a competition based on the labcoats… – and full details can be found on the Nature Chemistry Facebook group. We’re asking you send us photos of you (or your friends) in your shiny new Nature Chemistry labcoat (and the logo should be visible so that we know you’re not just using any old labcoat) – and the five most imaginative ones will win a year-long print subscription to the journal. Please keep the contents of the pictures SAFE (no standing next to explosions or flaming bottles of BuLi) and CLEAN (I’m not going to even explain that one…).

The competition will run through until Feb 2009, so you have plenty of time to snap some cool pics and send them to us – please go to the Nature Chemistry Facebook group for details of how to send us the photos – and that is also where we will post any photos (only the clean and safe ones though) that we receive. Feel free to send in as many photos of you (or your friends) in your Nature Chemistry labcoat as you wish (within reason) – and we’ll be writing back to you in March next year if you’ve won!

So as not to discriminate against those who couldn’t make it to New Orleans and won’t be attending the ACS meeting in Philly, feel free to design your own custom Nature Chemistry labcoat and send us your pictures (again, clean and safe please…)

Good luck!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Apologies for not posting in Journal journeys as much as I would have hoped – the one overwhelming feature of setting up a new journal is that it leaves very little time to blog…

I did want to take 10 minutes, however, to let you know that Nature Chemistry now has an editorial team – although it’s not complete just yet (we’re also looking for someone to be based in the Tokyo office). Brief editor bios (and their stunning headshots) can be found here on the new Nature Chemistry website. Each editor will also write their own Reactions piece in the coming weeks, so that you’ll get to know them a little better – and perhaps I’ll even get around to writing one myself sometime soon.

As part of the new website, we’ll also be publishing three new research highlights each Friday*, covering what we think are important papers appearing in the literature. These will be freely available on the Nature Chemistry website (although you may have to register for a nature.com account to access them).

*The first batch go live – with the new website – on a Thursday, not a Friday, because as I have learned, never push a new product live on a Friday… it doesn’t give you too much room for error before the weekend hits…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Sorry it’s been a while since the last JJ post – recruitment, portal and website issues have conspired to stop me from blogging about Nature Chemistry for a little while… but there are a few things I would like to mention:

1. Nature Chemistry is looking for another associate editor, to be based in Tokyo – here is an excerpt from the job ad:

As part of NPG’s expanding publishing programme in chemistry we are now seeking an additional Associate Editor, to be based in our Tokyo office, to work on Nature Chemistry and a number of publishing projects based in the Asia-Pacific region.

2. Nature Chemistry now has a Facebook page. I’m sure that half of the Sceptical Chymist readers have just groaned and the other half have let out some little whoop of joy (I’m just guessing at 50:50, for all I know it could be 99:1). Anyhow, consider it an experiment of some kind – let’s see where it goes… why not join and come along for the ride?

3. I will start the obligatory – “Is anyone in blogo-land going to the ACS meeting in New Orleans?” thread. I am, and a few other NPG-types are, and there’s always the possibility of a blogger get-together of some sort…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

I’m sure that some of you may have noticed that the signature to my Friday post on ‘Reactions’ finally had a link in it to Nature Chemistry.

This is the first incarnation of the Nature Chemistry website and just covers the basics at this point. It will be fleshed out with a lot more details in a couple of months’ time, but at least you can now see the colour…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a journal cover worth?

Well, in 2007, when I was on a paper that was lucky enough to be featured on the inside cover of Angewandte Chemie, it was 1000 Euros (that’s almost $1500). If our artwork had been judged to have been worthy for the real cover, i.e., the one on the outside, it would have cost 1800 Euros – I don’t know how the prices have changed since then. It’s a similar story at Chem. Commun. – one of my papers made it to the inside cover back in 2005, and I think a ‘contribution’ was made to the production costs – I don’t recall how much that was.

There has been some debate on journal cover art – some journals do have it and some don’t. Some charge for it and some don’t. Most authors in my experience are quite eager to have their work featured on a journal cover – it’s a big glossy colourful advert for their work – and occasionally they make for nice posters too!

When establishing a new journal, especially here at NPG, it’s another part of the process that needs some careful thought. A ‘pre-launch’ cover can be used on sample issues and in marketing campaigns to raise awareness of the journal in the community – in this case, the cover is not only an advert for the work it depicts, but the journal itself.

The reason I bring this up is that we’ve just finalized our ‘pre-launch’ cover for Nature Chemistry. Just like the other Nature research journals, on the cover of each issue we will have artwork that is related to the content inside – usually one of the research papers. Obviously we have no inside content yet – and so we had to think of an image that says ‘chemistry’ – and be inclusive of as many of the sub-fields as possible… not easy, and unless you just slap a stereotypical periodic table or a cheesy line-up of glassware containing pretty coloured liquids on it, there’s a bit of thought involved. And you also want something that is visually striking.

I think we’ve checked a lot of the boxes and have a very good cover – you’ll start seeing it on the web and at some conferences in the near future (and I’ll fill you in on the details of exactly what the image is and where it came from when it goes public…).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Objective: To write an informative and perhaps somewhat humorous blog entry for the Sceptical Chymist about ‘Objective’ statements that appear at the top of CVs and resumes – without sounding like I’m ranting too much.

As I discussed last week, the habit of including on your CV the fact that you have a driving licence seems a little redundant for certain jobs – such as scientific editors. Sure, if you’re applying to become the next Lewis Hamilton, however, go right ahead, you may even want to put it near the top of your CV – and in bold.

Another observation I would now like to make is that, depending upon the circumstances of your job search, putting an objective statement at the top of your CV could be, for want of a better word, pointless.

First however, here are the situations in which an objective statement is a good and possibly useful feature: (1) you are posting your CV to an online careers site where it may be viewed by all manner of different potential employers, or (2) you are attending a career fair and handing out your CV to a number of different, but I assume related, companies. In these cases, having a generic objective statement that tells people what you are looking for is a good thing, i.e., something along the lines of, ‘…to obtain an R&D position in the pharmaceutical industry that…’.

Now, let’s consider the job applicant who is applying for a specific job – such as that of an associate editor at Nature Chemistry for example. I would assume that because the candidate is applying for that particular job, their objective would be, ‘to obtain a position as an associate editor of Nature Chemistry’. Now, if you ask me, putting that at the top of your CV is pointless, because I assume that if you didn’t want the job, you wouldn’t have applied. It could be argued that this enables the candidate to succinctly sum up their career aspirations – but I think the cover letter is the most appropriate place for that.

The other option is that an applicant sends in a standard CV that has an objective that is not even closely related to the job they’re applying for – such as mentioning something about R&D when applying for an editing job for example. This, to me at least, suggests a lack of attention to detail and hints that the application is somewhat speculative in nature.

So, the best you can hope for by including an objective statement on your CV when applying for a specific job, is that you’ve stated the obvious. The worst, is that the statement bears no relation to the job in question – which doesn’t look good.

In summary, I hope that my blog post meets with your approval and I will follow up with you in a couple of weeks to discuss it with you further.*

Yours sincerely

Stuart

*Every careers-related seminar I went to in the US told me to include a sentence like this at the end of my cover letter, but it just seems a little too earnest to me. If a company really wants to talk to you about your application, trust me, they’ll be in touch…

**I feel I should add a similar disclaimer to that I put in the driving licence post, in that no one will be denied — or indeed selected for — an interview for Nature Chemistry based on whether an objective statement was included on their CV or not.

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)