nodalpoint.org

During the last three months I have been working as a trainee at the Molecular Systems Biology journal. My contract is know finished I thought I would post about my short experience in publishing for anyone possibly interested is testing this career path. To avoid any misuse, what I am writing is solely my opinion and does not reflect any position of the journal I worked for.My main motivation to try this out was my interest in science publishing and the scientific process in general.
We are at a particular interesting stage of transition from publishing on paper to publishing on the web and most publishers are trying to find ways to best cope with the change.

So what goes on in a journal ? Different journals probably have different work flows but at least in MSB, the most obvious analogy is a filtering pipeline. Submitted and commissioned articles work as the input, they are assigned to an editor who reads the article and any related work (yes, they do read them carefully :), and either reject by editorial decision or assign potential referees. The referee reports are evaluated and a final decision is reached (reject, major revision, minor revision). This description probably fits what any author that as gone trough the process of publishing a paper would expect.

What I learned to appreciate was the amount of work that goes into the editorial job. It takes a lot to keep up-to-date with such a breath of different subject areas. This is also one of the great aspects of the job, to have time to read and keep up with many different research fields. The commissioned work is also an interesting part of of the editorial role. The editors have to come up with subjects and authors that would make for good reviews/tutorials. This is almost like dreaming up research projects.
What are some of the downsides ? For me, the single biggest drawback is not being able to work on research projects. It is almost inevitable that reading about different areas and new ideas to start thinking about possible research questions but you cannot react to them. Another issue that I never thought about is that journals can also get scooped for the commissioned manuscripts. There is a limited number of authors and upcoming interesting topics so it is quite easy to see a topic that was under discussion published somewhere else. Another aspect of the job that might be sometimes uncomfortable is the communication between authors/referees and editors. In a system were the referees work for free and authors have a very strong pressure to get published, editors are left in the middle trying to put it all together in a way that is hopefully fair for everyone and results in a collection of interesting reading material for a particular community.

So in summary I thought this was a very useful experience. I think that it would be to everyones benefit that this type of trainee periods were more a standard part of a scientific education. It would give everyone more to relate with when we have to go trough the publishing process either as author, referee or editor.

This also brings me up to an announcement. MSB have made their blog (The Seven Stones) public today. The blog was started during my stay at MSB and some of the previous posts (by Thomas Lemberger) can already give an impression of the main topics that will be covered.

I think blogging can be a great conduit for journal editors to express their personal views, to share with others what they feel is interesting research (and not just from their own journals), to post about conferences they attend and spark or participate in discussions that are of interest to the community they serve. Until recently the editorial pages were the only way to do this but maybe blogs can take up this role and make it slightly less formal and more participatory.

I would even risk a potential controversial idea. What if journal editors could use their blogs to post about interesting research questions ?