February 23, 2017

ENCODS 2016: An Insight Into the Publishing Process

ENCODS 2017 will also offer a number of workshops. One of our students attended the "Publishing Process" workshop last year:


The ENCODS 2016 program contained inspiring keynote lectures from various neuroscience fields, interesting talks by PhD students, lunch poster sessions, various workshops to choose from and offered, last but not least, a great opportunity to meet fellow students from 35 different countries. 

Publishing in a Top Journal
An especially interesting part of the program was the workshop “The Publishing Process” held by Alexander Arguello, Associate Editor of Nature Neuroscience. He gave us a professional insight into the processes of publishing and editing and was ready to discuss associated problems. He opened the workshop with a brief history of scientific publication and then explained the editing process at Nature Neuroscience, which is coordinated by eight editors. They receive and evaluate altogether about 250 papers per month and decide on rejection or review – at the end of this process, approximately 10% of the submitted articles are accepted. Besides considering the interest of the article for the typical reader of the journal, the assessment is mainly based on the abstract, focusing on clarity, novelty, scientific benefit and a plausible concept of the study. 

Good data visualization is key

Considerable focus is also placed on graphs and pictures, which should clearly convey the message of the paper without needing the actual text – nice images are always a plus! In the end, each editor alone, sometimes after consultation with his or her colleagues, has the final say on whether a paper goes into review or is sent back to the author. We concluded this part of the workshop by evaluating various abstracts that had actually once been sent to Nature Neuroscience for their chance to be published. This was not always easy to do at first glance!

Do We Still Need Printed Journals?
During the course of the workshop, we also discussed the problems and advantages of printed journals versus open access options. As more and more papers are published every year, it is hard and time-consuming to decide which articles are worth reading, especially if they are outside one's own research focus. Printed journals can serve as a “filter” and provide a selection of important articles. However, as they are intended to reach a broader audience (and pursue financial interests), they tend to follow certain trends, as is currently happening with the Zika virus or CRISPR. 
Moreover, especially widely read journals such as Nature do not always succeed in identifying revolutionary, paradigm-shifting ideas. In fact, those are often published in smaller journals – so don’t feel bad if your paper doesn’t make it into Nature!

 Printed journals tend to follow fads

The majority of the workshop participants were in favor of open access publishing, as it seems to make scientific results more transparent and can provide a platform for constructive discussion. Nonetheless, there is a certain danger of false data interpretation that might lead to a misunderstanding of scientific results by non-experts. A solution to this problem might be a database only open to experts from a particular field of science. 

Scientific Journal Editor As a Job Option
For those who are still undecided whether or not to stay in research after finishing their PhD, it might be worthwhile to know that being an editor in a scientific journal is actually a realistic job option. The work as an editor at Nature Neuroscience consists not only of the above mentioned tasks, but also of travelling to various conferences to keep up with the latest developments in science. So, if you are looking for a job without all the worries about grants, funding and temporary contracts this might be a career option for you. Just go to the website of your favourite journal to check for open positions!


http://www.fens.org/Training/ENCODS/ENCODS2017/


by Anna Pfeffer, PhD Student AG Steiner
This article originally appeared in September 2016 in "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro" 

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