From the Editorial Fellows

By Laura Falkenberg Ten years ago I attended my first ever international scientific conference. It was in my hometown and my supervisors had encouraged me to go – I arrived not really knowing what to expect. I spent the week feeling overwhelmed and slightly out of place, especially at the poster session where I presented my work. This year I ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg As the inaugural Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow, when I applied to the program I was largely entering the unknown. In figuring out if this was an opportunity that I was interested in, and putting together my application, I scoured the Internet for information on Editorial Fellowships generally and, in particular, what this one would entail. Unfortunately, ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg As an Early Career Researcher (ECR), being invited to peer review is an important milestone. It shows that a journal Editor recognizes you as an expert, and believes that you can evaluate the work of others. But, once you’ve accepted the invitation to review, worry can creep in – you might ask yourself if you actually ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg One of the key activities scientists undertake is writing – for publication in peer-reviewed journals, blog posts such as this one, and even in Tweets. There is much advice out there on how to write, with many books published in the last year alone. These books cover everything from very broad issues (e.g. how to write ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg Over my past three blog posts I have been summarising the workshops run at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting about manuscript submission (here and here), and how to be an effective reviewer (here). In this final post in the series, I will talk about the discussion on effective reviewing that followed the presentation on this topic by Maggie Xenopoulos ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg A key skill scientists can develop is the ability to write effective peer reviews. At the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting, journal editors led a session on how to do this. The contributing editors were Maggie Xenopoulos (Deputy Editor-in-Chief, ASLO’s Limnology and Oceanography) and Miguel Goni (Editor-in-Chief, AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences). As with the session on manuscript ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg In the initial post in this series, I summarised the presentation on manuscript submission given by Pat Soranno (Editor-in-Chief, ASLO’s Limnology and Oceanography: Letters) and Robert Pincus (Editor-in-Chief, AGU’s Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems) at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting. Here, I will focus on a key point explored in the ensuing discussion, specifically the issue of how ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg At the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon, journal Editors participated in workshops about key publishing activities, specifically manuscript submission and peer review. Each of these sessions opened with the Editors giving a brief prepared presentation, before moving to more general discussion prompted by questions from the audience. In this blog post, and the next ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg As the Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow, one thing I have learnt from talking with journal editors is that they are often open to helping authors, particularly those early in their careers, develop ideas and manuscripts for publication. A key opportunity many researchers have to interact with journal editors is at scientific meetings. Journal editors can, however, ...

By Laura J. Falkenberg One my central activities as a Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow (more information on the fellowship can be found here) is to learn more about the editorial process. An obvious step towards this is to be involved as a peer reviewer. While I had reviewed for a range of journals in different sub-fields of biology and ecology before ...