How often have you been at a scientific meeting and heard an exciting talk, leading to strong responses from the audience in the form of questions that appear to represent alternative points of view or interpretations, only for that discourse to be silenced by the need to stay on time for later talks? How often do you get the feeling from reading primary papers that the authors are misor over-interpreting their own data or simply ignoring relevant prior publications that you feel are important to more accurately interpret the work? How often are students and postdocs today trained to emphasize the significance of their own work, to “sell their science” in their writing, to the exclusion of providing a critical assessment of the limitations of their study or alternative interpretations? Would you like a place, a forum, to address each of these issues or concerns? Would you like to read and be offered the opportunity to be involved in reasoned discussions that are aimed at answering questions, resolving disagreements and moving science forward?
These are some of the questions that the editors of Cellular Logistics have been discussing while putting together this new journal. Some of us agreed to become involved with this new journal specifically to try to stimulate real and open discussions of topics that never seem to get a full airing or that are discussed perhaps at meetings dominated by one or a few dominant personalities. What would happen if we invited researchers to air their views, their interpretations, their confusions and opened them up for discussion?
We have each met scientists who appear to possess “total recall” and who can cite papers by authors, year, journal to support their arguments in real time. Alas, however, we are not among those scientists. But given time to think, consider, and review previously published work we each believe that we can explain our models reasonably well and would welcome anyone poking holes in them and pointing out counter-views or data. Today's culture argues that the collective result will be better than that of any one individual. (We are referencing here to Wikipedia, and not The Borg).
We are lucky to live in the era of communications explosion and we would like to take advantage of it for facilitating open discussions about controversial issues in cell biology. Hence, we are launching an interactive blog, the Cellular Logistics Blog, or CellLogBlog.
The current plan is to solicit and identify one review/commentary each issue from an expert in a field with the specific intention of sparking discussions. Perhaps we can at times identify two authors with opposing models to present their arguments. We have found that discussing papers with opposing models in the classroom can help tremendously with the identification of the strengths and weaknesses in each. We also welcome your suggestions of topics that you would want to be discussed.
Debate will take place in the form of a discussion board/blog on the journal website, linked to the article, and with the potential to link to related articles as the discussion progresses. The site will be monitored, but only to ensure that all comments are appropriate and provide constructive input. All postings will require attribution as to authorship. While anonymity might increase freedom of criticism, especially for more junior people, it has the disadvantage of possible defamation, which we would like to avoid. Therefore, we decided to start with only two rules: ‘appropriateness’ and ‘attribution.’
Like the science that this blog is targeting, we view the blog as a work in progress and one that will surely be improved with input from others. We welcome your suggestions for ways to improve, expand, or increase the usefulness of the CellLogBlog. We already have three Blog-Topic-Reviews lined up for three issues of Cellular Logistics. Here are the tentative titles and authors:
“How many transport strategies have been demonstrated, or at least partially demonstrated,” Alberto Luini
“Escaping the Golgi: A problem of the first order,” Ben Glick
“The roles of ArfGAP1 in carrier biogenesis,” Richard A. Kahn
The CellLogBlog is open for discussion. What are the controversial issues in cell biology that you would like to be discussed? Who do you suggest would be appropriate to write the review? Send us your suggestions and ideas.
Please let us know. We are listening!
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