The Trials and Aspirations of an Early Career Researcher Advisory Board

Early-career researchers (ECR) are the future of science. From the perspective of job security and access to resources, they are also the most vulnerable segment of the scientific community. In consideration of both, The Journal of Neuroscience (JNeurosci), under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Sabine Kastner, initiated the ECR Advisory Board to involve ECRs in policymaking at JNeurosci and to support the ECR community. This editorial describes the context, the goals, the challenges, and the accomplishments of the ECR Advisory Board in its inaugural years and highlights opportunities in the years to come.

ECRs are essential drivers of scientific innovation (Sabharwal, 2013), but their capacity to impact their field depends on contextual factors including their mentoring environment, professional network, and access to resources—perhaps to an even greater extent than their own personal initiative (Eubanks et al., 2016). Similarly, their ability to secure a professional path in their field depends on multiple factors. Early-career publications are one of the biggest determinants of an ECR's professional success and the impact their work will have across their career (Li et al., 2019; Krauss et al., 2023). Yet despite the importance of early publications, ECRs may face numerous barriers to publishing including insufficient mentorship, prohibitive costs, and constraints on their ability to serve as reviewers (Carroll et al., 2025). A lack of mentoring or a limited professional network might mean that ECRs miss critical guidance about how to navigate initial submissions or revisions. It may also mean that they lack essential insight into the goals and perspectives taken by reviewers and editors. In an ever-tightening job market, exacerbated by recent disruptions to public funding for and trust in science, mentoring and support for academic publishing can be the difference between ECRs staying in or leaving science. This professional precarity ultimately comes at a steep cost—discouraging risk-taking, eroding innovation, and diminishing impact for ECRs and thereby the broader scientific community.

Society journals, like JNeurosci, are uniquely positioned to support ECRs. Unlike for-profit journals, the policies and governance of society journals are wholly controlled by members of the scientific community who are most in touch with, and can be most responsive to ECR needs. In turn, ECRs can benefit from investments that the society makes to support the “scientific ecosystem” in the form of conferences, network building, awards for ECRs, and ECR-focused training programs (Dolan et al., 2023).

JNeurosci has a clear record of policies to support ECRs. Notable examples include the Reviewer Mentor Program, which gives ECRs at large a path to direct, mentored experience as a reviewer, and the Journal Club, which allows students and postdocs to publish mentored commentaries on recent JNeurosci articles. Regarding financial constraints, JNeurosci has endeavored to lower barriers through tiered publication fees for scientists from under-resourced communities and efforts to hold down publication costs which now stand in stark contrast to, and ultimately put downward pressure on the article publishing fees charged by for-profit publishers as well.

To institutionalize support for ECRs and formalize their engagement, an ECR Advisory Board was established in the fall of 2023 with the express intent of supporting ECRs by soliciting input on their needs and shaping journal policies based on their recommendations. Inaugural board members were convened at the 2023 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting where we first engaged in policy discussions with the wider Editorial Board. Speaking to the responsiveness of society journals, many of us were struck, during those first meetings, by the earnestness and openness with which the Editorial Board considers ECR needs and prioritizes policies that address them. We were immediately involved in ongoing internal discussions about how, for example, to assess and improve the quality of reviews that authors receive at JNeurosci or how to encourage reviewers to participate in open peer review. Open peer review is another policy which can benefit ECRs: not only is it intended to improve review quality, but it also creates a public record where future authors can get an inside look at what goes into reviews and what leads to publication.

With optimism from our first interactions with JNeurosci leadership, the ECR Advisory Board established a charter (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/ecr-board-charter) in the spring of 2024. Central roles and responsibilities articulated in the charter include assessing ECR needs in the wider community, making formal policy recommendations, providing feedback on ongoing policy discussions, and promoting and disseminating JNeurosci initiatives impacting ECRs. We also compiled an extensive list of preliminary recommendations which we began discussing with Dr. Kastner from our first meetings.

While society journals are in a uniquely strong position to respond to member needs, they are also large, inertial organizations with a typically conservative approach to policy adaptation. JNeurosci is no exception, and the ambition of our initial policy list has, in some ways, necessarily readjusted to that reality. In some cases, our policy agenda was stymied by institutional inertia, or they were opposed by competing initiatives. In other cases, our policy agenda ran aground on the shoals of impracticality. Indeed, an advantage of being part of the ECR Advisory Board is exposure to the many unseen policy decisions, mechanisms, and constraints of running a scientific journal. While there are other journals that also have ECR Boards (e.g., the Early-Career Advisory Group at eLife or journals at The Company of Biologists), all have their own leadership, histories, and cultures, and, as we are learning, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how ECRs should integrate themselves into journal policymaking. Progress in any context necessarily involves a long-term dialogue with a shared commitment to policy goals.

In spite of these challenges, we managed to secure tangible outcomes in our inaugural years, beyond adopting our charter and establishing our position at JNeurosci. For example, we successfully advocated for promoting language-editing services to support non-native English speakers in the publications process. Additionally, we instituted a forthcoming series, “ECR Voices,” which will consist of conversations on issues that ECRs face, especially regarding publishing, based on solicited feedback from the ECR community. We also have our ever-evolving list of policy goals and recommendations and an ever-clearer understanding of how to make things happen. Future targets involve new ways to platform promising early-career scientists, to increase transparency in JNeurosci policies and fees, and to make reviews more useful for ECRs who are new to the publication process. Looking to the future, we retain our optimism about what can be accomplished with the right leadership, the right vision, and an earnest commitment to supporting ECRs in publishing at JNeurosci.