An interview with Shari Wiseman, Chief Editor of Nature Neuroscience, conducted by April Cashin-Garbutt.

Following her recent seminar at SWC, Chief Editor of Nature Neuroscience, Shari Wiseman shares her expert advice on positioning research papers for success, debunks common myths about the publication process, and offers a glimpse into the future of scientific publishing.

Can you explain how the peer review process works?

When a paper is submitted to Nature Neuroscience, it first comes to me as I’m the Chief Editor. I choose which editor on our team is going to handle it, usually based on their subject area expertise. Then the editor will make an initial assessment, sometimes in consultation with other people on the team and sometimes on their own. They decide whether the paper will be sent out for peer review or if we’re going to direct the authors to a different journal in our portfolio.

If the paper is going to be sent out for review, the handling editor will figure out what complement of expertise is needed among the reviewers. A lot of the papers that we handle are interdisciplinary or are bringing together different ideas, different fields, different techniques, so you usually need a few different kinds of reviewers.

The editor will then start inviting those reviewers and hopefully they say yes. If not, then they invite more reviewers.

When the reviews come back, the handling editor reads through them all to get an overall impression of how the paper was received and whether the comments are addressable. At Nature Neuroscience, we tend to think of even quite ambitious requests as addressable, because very often our authors are able to do those things. 

However sometimes there are more serious conceptual issues that may be difficult to overcome in a revision. For example, the research may not be novel enough, it might not be enough of an advance for the field. There may be some fundamental flaw in the way that the experiments were designed that would mean that the author would have to redo the whole paper to make it a fit for our journal.

The editor who is handling the paper will get advice from other people on the team and from me and then decide whether to reject the paper or to invite a revision. The authors may then talk to the editor about their plans for the revision and discuss the most important components.

After the paper is revised, it then goes back out for peer review – sometimes just one more round of peer review, sometimes two or three more rounds until the reviewers and the editor are satisfied that the paper is ready to accept. 

What advice would you give to researchers to position their paper successfully?

Make sure that the most important messages of the paper, and the advance of the paper relative to what was known before, is very clearly communicated. It should be very clearly communicated in the title, the abstract, the cover letter and the body of the paper including the introduction and the discussion.

Sometimes as scientists, we have a tendency to either doubt ourselves or feel like we need to qualify things and be careful about not overstating things. That’s legitimate and a good thing. But when you’ve been working on a project for so long and you’re an expert in the field, you can be totally immersed in your own data and there can be a tendency to think that is it just obvious what the advance is, or that it is very clear what you did. Yet this may not be the case for somebody who is an outsider to the field. In particular, the editors readying your paper are probably not going to be experts in the field because we’re handling a very broad swathe of neuroscience.

What value does Nature Neuroscience provide and why should a researcher consider submitting to your journal?

It is true that researchers can now just post a preprint of their work on bioRxiv and make it accessible. We encourage this as we are big advocates for open science. But I think the work that we do is still really valuable to the community.

I sometimes say that browsing bioRxiv is a little bit like shopping on eBay – you are going to find something of high quality, but you are going to have to sift through a lot of things that are not. This takes a lot of time. 

I feel there is tremendous value in the curation function that we perform. We are a very selective journal. For example, about 80% of the submissions that come in are rejected without review. Then of the 20% that are sent out for peer review, around half are rejected. And so, we only publish around 7% of what is submitted. 

I think this is something that our readers really appreciate. Neuroscience is a huge field and there is so much information out there. I think it is really helpful to have trained editors who have a broad view of the field, making decisions about what we think our readers are going to find the most interesting, the most exciting, and the highest quality.

Through our editorial process and our peer review process, we also really help the research to shine. A lot of times, the paper submitted is a diamond in the rough. But there is a kernel of something exciting there that we recognise but we see that it needs to develop in a certain way. For example, certain parts need to be expanded and made stronger. Through our process, we are able to do that.

Once your paper is accepted, the editor works with you to make sure the writing is as clear and as effective as it can be. We have professional copy editors, art illustrators, and production editors who help make the paper as polished as it can be.

We also have a professional in-house press team who can sometimes help promote our papers. We are very lucky that because we are a highly visible journal, the research that we publish does tend to get a lot of attention and I think that is also a service to our authors and our readers. 

I think that we provide a lot of value, and I hope that our journal is going to be the place that our readers want to keep checking in with to see the most exciting neuroscience research. 

What do you feel are the biggest myths about publishing in Nature Neuroscience?

One of the biggest myths is that we only care about who the authors are, and we’ll publish anything from famous authors. This is definitely not the case, and I personally have rejected papers from Nobel Prize winners and people who we think of as titans of neuroscience. 

My goal is to publish the best neuroscience journal in the world, and I have no interest in publishing worse content because it comes with a famous name. 

Another myth is that if you just write the cover letter in a certain way, then we will definitely send it out for review!

Very often I hear from cellular and molecular neuroscientists that we only care about systems neuroscience. We also have systems neuroscientists telling us we only care about cellular and molecular neuroscience. Everyone has gripes about their field not being represented, but I feel we do a good job of covering the breadth of the field.

There are many more myths too!

What guidance would you give someone looking to transition from academia to working for a journal?

We typically hire people from academic research jobs, usually from a postdoc. It is very rare that we would hire someone directly from grad school. The reason why is that they’re going to be competing with people who have postdoc experience. 

The reason why the postdoc experience is valuable is that it means people have spent more time in the field and have a broader exposure to different types of labs and different types of science. They also tend to have a broader scientific network of people that they know and more understanding on who works on what in the field. They also have experience of seeing trends come and go, which I think is useful.

We don’t have an expectation necessarily that someone will have had editorial experience before, but I think that any science communication experience that you have is valuable and is a good thing to highlight. Serving as a reviewer or reviewing a paper together with your PI is very valuable experience because it gives you exposure to the peer review process and what unpublished manuscripts look like.

Also giving talks, writing grants, any kind of leadership experience or outreach experience can be helpful. Also experience of blogging and social media posts about science can be helpful as a way to get exposure to the scientific conversation. 

The other advice I would give, which may sound obvious, is to make sure it is clear from your cover letter why you want to be an editor and that you’ve thought through what the job is and why you think you would be good at it. You would be surprised at how many generic cover letters we receive! People write about all the different scientific techniques they can do and all of the amazing discoveries that they’ve published and that’s great, but it is not so relevant for what we’re looking for.

What are the best and worst things about working for a journal?

I think there’s only one best job in neuroscience, and I have it! I love this job and so there are lots of best things for me.

The part of the job that I find the most rewarding is the public facing part such as being able to meet with scientists. We get to travel a fair amount, which is fun. But I really like meeting with scientists and helping them through the process of publishing. I like being able to help make it easier for scientists to publish their paper and I also really enjoy getting exposed to all this exciting new science. I find it really invigorating and fun.

I also love our team. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues at Nature Neuroscience and I enjoy working with them. Science is just this constant sort of optimism and awe, and I am so blessed to be able to be immersed in that all the time. I also have a lot of variety, which is great.

In terms of the negatives, I would say mostly is just that we have a lot of small tasks that we need to stay on top of. Like everyone, we have more work to do than we have time to do it! And so, I’m very often running behind and apologising, which can be stressful. 

There can also be stressful situations that we have to navigate in terms of research integrity issues. Or if there’s a refutation of a paper that we’ve published, those things can be stressful.

What do you think the future holds for scientific publishing, particularly with regards to the impact of AI?

I’ve been an editor for eight years, and things have changed very fast. I think things are going to continue to do so. The future is, in some sense, uncertain. I think things may look very different in five years than they do now. 

Things already look very different from when I started. When I started at Nature Neuroscience, our journal was fully subscription only. Now we’ve got a hybrid journal with an open access publishing option. And so that was a big change that swept through the industry.

AI is definitely a big unknown. I think it is starting to enter into our processes and into our thinking, but we don’t know what the full impact of it will be yet. Is it possible that one day I’ll be replaced by a robot that does a better job of picking the best papers than I do? I’m not sure but it’s not impossible.

Is it possible that we’ll have an AI component to the review process? Maybe. I don’t think we’ll ever replace human reviewers, but there may be an AI component in terms of checking the figures to make sure there’s no image duplication or to make sure the statistics are explained in sufficient detail and all the necessary components are there.

Anything tedious may be replaced by AI, which may be for the best. Of course, we’re also seeing AI generated text and AI generated images. The official policy for our company is that we’re happy for authors to use a tool like ChatGPT but we do prefer that authors mention this in the methods section. 

I don’t have a problem with people using AI to improve their writing and I think it’s particularly great for non-native speakers. But we don’t allow those services to be an author on the paper because they can’t be accountable. Obviously, accountability is a really important part of authorship. 

We also don’t allow AI generated images of any kind, because it is just too hard to make sure that there’s no copyright issues.

On a more sombre note, I think the future of the whole scientific enterprise in the US right now is a little bit in question. A lot of the revenue for our journals is paid for by public funding and it’s a little bit unclear what the future of that will be, but we’ll see.

About Shari Wiseman

Shari Wiseman joined Nature Neuroscience in 2017, and became Chief Editor in 2021. Prior to that, she received her PhD from Yale University, where she worked with Dr. Angus Nairn.
 
She employed biochemical, proteomic, and behavioural approaches to examine signal transduction mechanisms that regulate neuronal protein synthesis. She then went on to postdoctoral research at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School investigating animal models of autism spectrum disorders, followed by additional postdoctoral training in Dr. Stephen Moss's lab at Tufts University, where she studied the regulation of GABAB receptors by excitotoxic stimuli. Her research interests include cellular and molecular neuroscience, genetics/genomics, and addiction. Shari is based in the New York office.