The fifth decade

As the journal transitions from fourth to fifth decade, its fourth and fifth Chief Editor discuss its role in the research process.

As the journal transitions from fourth to fifth decade, its fourth and fifth Chief Editor discuss its role in the research process.

On the occasion of the first Chief Editor change in ten years, we reflect on the journal’s role and achievements. Since its launch in 1982, The EMBO Journal has become a fixture as a leading community venue for the best life science research. The journal’s scope has broadened considerably, mirroring the emergence of molecular biology as a discipline that transcends all biosciences research—from cell and developmental biology to biophysics and structural biology. The editors attach as much value to physiological relevance as to molecular mechanism. The journal’s evolution reflects the welcome dissipation of boundaries between bioscience disciplines, and its author demographics reflect that science knows no boundaries of geography, ethnicity, or gender.

The journal’s editorial ethos is dedicated to excellence in the quality, the depth, and the breadth of the research it presents. Six expert scientific editors work with the scientific community to select consequential research of outstanding originality and interest to the journal’s broad global readership—just under 300 research papers and a dozen reviews and commentaries each year. The incoming Chief Editor provides a new dimension with research interests ranging from molecular cell biology to organismal biology and applied immunology and is, together with an Editorial Advisory Board balanced for subject, geography, and gender, emblematic of the journal’s function as a community‐focused, essential resource (Batista, 2021).

The journal has never seen its role restricted to providing a service for author prestige and academic credit, but rather as a platform to support influential research by optimizing its dissemination in a broadly accessible, reproducible manner—and by helping improve it where necessary. EMBO Journal editors have avoided a myopic focus on Impact Factor enhancement to select what is truly influential: science that matters.

As a flagship program of EMBO, we at EMBO Press see supporting progressive change in scientific practice as our mandate. The five EMBO Press journals are less sensitive to economic constraints, and this has allowed us to develop a suite of progressive policies in close cooperation with our community advisors. A dozen years ago, we initiated the now widely applied “Transparent Process” at this journal, whereby we publish referee comments, author responses, and editorial decision letters in full alongside the paper (Pulverer, 2010). This recently expanded to include the “Refereed Preprint” concept, encouraging authors to associate journal referee reports with their preprints (Pulverer & Lemberger, 2019).

We reset the vectorial author > editor > referee > editor > author information flow to allow for a more balanced process grounded on a level playing field. Our editors moderate referee cross‐commenting on one another’s reports, and we recently added a pre‐decision author consultation step, allowing editors to formulate a more equitable decision.

For a decade, we have been putting the data in papers back in center view: we encourage the deposition of minimally processed source data. The journal provides a free service to curate and annotate figures, which enables direct search for data and experiments via our SourceData platform (Liechti et al, 2017). The systematic pre‐publication screening of manuscripts for appropriate data deposition, statistics transparency, and responsible research practices, in particular regarding image integrity and text duplications, resolve innumerable issues that would have otherwise been subject to post‐publication corrections (Wilfong Boxheimer & Pulverer, 2019).

We see the true value that we add to science in enabling a constructive peer‐review process and in running this in conjunction with a professional quality control process. We only formally peer review those manuscripts that are likely to be publishable with realistically achievable additional experimentation, allowing authors of manuscripts not suitable for publication in this journal to move on within a week, not a month. Referees know that they see pre‐selected papers and can focus on essential shortcomings, rather than editorializing on journal fit or asking for far reaching new experimentation to recast the scope. Where appropriate, we pre‐consult with other EMBO Press journal editors and our partners in the Life Science Alliance consortium to offer a firm and clearly framed second choice—more than a fifth of submissions are published in this way without additional delay. Reviewed papers receive clear editorial guidance on which specific referee points will have to be addressed experimentally or textually for publication: over 90% of invitations to revise are published within 4 months and with no more than one round of substantive experimental revision.

The journal also supports the Review Commons network, which provides authors with a round of journal‐independent peer‐review and allows seamless posting of Refereed Preprints, reducing the endemic problem of serial submission, enhancing transparency and improving the paper/journal matching process (Lemberger & Pulverer, 2019). Cognizant of the significant delays entailed by a serious quality control process, we have enthusiastically embraced preprinting and data repository posting from the start (Pulverer, 2016). We see these forms of open science dissemination as a part of an efficient scientific process, rather than an alternative to a full peer‐review‐informed selection process.

Thus, The EMBO Journal differs from other general bioscience journals in our focus on rendering a very selective process more efficient, constructive and transparent, our focus on the data in research papers, our emphasis on optimizing every published paper, and in our mission: setting new general standards in scientific dissemination as a service to the community.

Dimensions of selectivity

The journal’s editors firmly stand by the value and role of selective publishing, but we are acutely aware that selective journals and questionable journal metrics such as the Impact Factor are frequently misused as a hard‐wired proxy in research assessment. As co‐founders of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) initiative to improve the evaluation of scholarly outputs, we argue for a more dynamic, flexible, informed approach that includes journal publishing as one component of a multidimensional research assessment process (Pulverer, 2015). We also believe that preprint posting can help depressurize the system, allowing us to focus on the true value of selective publishing: making reliable, far‐reaching research available to a broad community beyond subject boundaries. The exponentially growing body of knowledge in the biosciences renders it ever more important to ensure that we retain mechanisms of sharing the most important science beyond our immediate specializations.

However, it is essential that journal selectivity is informed and fair. We believe that our system of dedicated scientific editors working in conjunction with active scientists for a two‐step selection process is as constructive as it is pragmatic. What do we select for? Beyond a fit to the journal’s broad scope, we seek papers that offer a very concrete conceptual advance. The advance will further have to be broadly interesting. The journal has no “species preference”, but well‐established model organisms, human relevance, or evolutionary conservation can add to the generality of the findings—though demonstrations of evolutionary divergence can be particularly interesting in themselves. Papers that mainly show reproducibility of previously published findings and evolutionary conservation are crucial, but typically not essential reading for a broad audience. Papers that provide null data or that compellingly refute previously published findings are an indispensable component of the scientific opus, but they are typically of more interest to subject experts. The EMBO Journal will only consider refutations on papers previously published in the journal and null data that address major scientific “dogma” (a concept of decidedly questionable value in biosciences research).

As a second dimension of selectivity, the journal tends to favor extended papers that “deep drill” into a rich dataset to understand connections at the molecular, genetic or cell biological level. We short‐hand this as “mechanism” but are acutely aware that this term is as loaded as “dogma”. To be sure, the more novel a finding is, the fewer the molecular tools available and the more “descriptive” (another sensitive term!) a paper will tend to be, without compromising general interest.

As a third dimension, we select for a high level of experimental evidence—beyond a reasonable level of evidence for statistical significance of conclusions, we particularly emphasize orthogonal evidence, using orthologous systems and, ideally, independent approaches.

While citation rates or web access can correlate with the general interest attribute we described, the editors do not select primarily for citation potential. Neither is the selection intended to signal an achievement directly translatable to academic credit.

Open Access and Open Science

We hope to have made a compelling case for selective journal publishing conditional on a fair, authoritative process designed to optimize each published research paper. To be sure, the costs of this process are considerable, yet they represent a small fraction of the research expenditure that underpins a paper—an amount that is in our view more than recouped in enhancing the quality, reproducibility, and discoverability of the research. The journal publishes about half its papers fully Open Access; the other half is freely accessible from 6 months after publication. Ensuring fair and affordable access to both authors and readers underpins a community journal. Conversion to full Open Access will hinge on securing a financially sustainable way to cover the costs of the publishing process that we outlined. The community has been part of and supported every step in the process. If full OA at reduced costs is the overriding priority to the scientific community, we invite feedback on where we might compromise.

Back to the future

Much remains to be done to ensure the journal optimally supports science and becomes a go‐to‐venue for researchers globally. We will strive for a better gender, ethnic, and geographical balance among authors, referees, and editors that, at minimum, matches community demographics. The referee pool of the journal—vast as it is—needs to be better populated by experts from the emerging centers of excellence outside of Europe and North America.

We also need to include early career researchers in the review process more formally: we look to a synergistic process where postdocs focus on a deep dive into experimental detail coincidental with a more general assessment by senior experts, who actively mentor their younger colleagues to ensure we better train peer review skills.

We will aim to enhance academic credit and accountability by ensuring peer review will matter for research assessment and by applying more granular author contributions, allowing every author to point out their specific contributions. We will work toward making source data dissemination a standard and toward better interlinking methods sections to results in order to enhance reproducibility.

In terms of our subject matter, while we are sometimes still viewed as a journal partial to basic molecular cell biology, for two decades we have embraced a much wider scope emphasizing cross‐disciplinary research, and our goal is to render ourselves global not just geographically, but in the comprehensiveness of our scope. We intend to expand our radius into the life sciences as a whole—from ecology to medicine—to better reflect the biosciences’ inherent interconnectedness.

The new Chief Editor is emblematic of the global outlook of the journal. He hails from Argentina, received his Ph.D. in Italy, and further trained and researched—with the support of EMBO—in the UK. He now leads a research program in the US spanning from basic B cell biology—including receptor signaling, metabolism, and autophagy—to preclinical vaccinology.

We will do our best to ensure that the editorial staff successfully shape this essential science platform in this exciting era of cross‐disciplinary research and multidimensional open science dissemination mechanisms.

The EMBO Journal editorial team at editorial meeting, February 2020 (to left, clockwise: Elisabetta Argenzio, Bernd Pulverer, Stephanie Weldon (guest), Karin Dumstrei, Ieva Gailite, Stefanie Böhm, Facundo Batista, Hartmut Vodermaier, Daniel Klimmeck (center))

The EMBO Journal (2021) 40: e108009.