JUNE: Continuing to Advance Neuroscience Education in the New Decade

Almost every morning I wake up to about a dozen emails “kindly requesting” that I submit a manuscript or “kindly inviting” me to join the editorial board of a new journal. At first, the emails were from neuroscience or education themed journals but more recently, the kind invitations come from journals of all disciplines where I have no expertise or publication record including agriculture, economics, mathematics, etc. I suspect that many readers of JUNE also get these emails which are a symptom of the current publishing landscape that includes predatory journals. Things seem to be so out of control that there is now a growing body of research on the impact predatory journals have on science and publishing—just type the term “predatory journals” into the search-bar of Pubmed (www.pubmed.org) to see what I mean.

This is the ideal time to remind our readers, old and new, that JUNE has been the most trusted journal dedicated to innovation and scholarship in neuroscience education since 2002. Our editorial board consists of neuroscience educators from diverse colleges and universities who teach neuroscience lecture and/or lab courses and have been influential in starting or growing their undergraduate neuroscience program/major (in addition to engaging in neuroscience research). Our editorial processes have as their goal the fair and rigorous peer-review of manuscripts, keeping in mind that JUNE is a forum for diverse types of submissions reflecting the broad work, activities, and innovation carried out by the neuroscience education community.

The Fall 2019 issue serves as an example of how JUNE continues to be a platform for dissemination of the diverse ways our colleagues advance neuroscience education. For example, Stavnezer and Lom (2019) describe their work carried out at two different institutions which used an active-learning approach to promote student participation and review of prior course material. This issue includes two case-based learning modules (Ogilvie 2019; Watson 2019) designed to engage students in exploration of neuroanatomy and clinical neuroscience. There are four papers in this issue that describe novel approaches and/or resources for neuroscience laboratory courses. Two papers focus on exposure of students to technical and quantitative neuroanatomy methods for light (D’Arcy et al. 2019) and electron microscopy data (Nahmani 2019). Prakash and Toro (2019) describe their use of zebrafish in a laboratory course to illustrate neuroendocrine modulation of behavior. Giglia et al. (2019) describe their design of a 3D printed, equivalent circuit model that can be used to teach membrane physiology. Flanagan-Cato (2019) describes a neuroscience service-learning course that takes place at a local high school. Finally, Rochon and colleagues (2019) use updated U.S. Department of Education data of undergraduate neuroscience programs and graduates to demonstrate continued growth in both of these metrics compared to previous studies using similar methods (Ramos et al. 2011; 2016).

Putting together every issue of JUNE is a labor of love for myself and the rest of the JUNE editorial team. The term “labor” is appropriate here because it is a tremendous amount of work for everyone involved including our reviewers and copyeditor as well as for JUNE authors, who frequently endure two rounds of peer-review and resubmission. Looking back on the JUNE papers from this past decade including the papers in the Fall 2019 issue, it is clear that this effort is worth it and the JUNE editorial team will continue our important and hard work as we move into a new decade.