Barbara Jasny, Supervisory Senior editor for Science, the weekly publication of AAAS, was the lead-off evening speaker last night at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems. In the audience were scores of scientists hoping to score at Science, among the more than 1 million readers.
I took some notes that I hope you'll find interesting: Science was founded by none other than Thomas Edison in 1880 (prompting one audience member to ask why they don't publish more in the engineering sciences--"we'd like to," Jasny said; ratio of pieces published--60:40, physical:biological sciences). They receive 230 manuscripts EVERY WEEK, which go out to a board of 100 reviewers. Of these, 70% go back to the authors within two weeks (aka rejected); of the remaining 30%, 10% are published.
Once you pass the first hurdle, you're handed off to the pool of 27 editors, all PhDs or MDs, many with post-doc degrees. Guess I won't be applying for a job there, though, transparently, I could write or call any of them as all their emails and telephone numbers are published. Your work sees the light of print if: it's your best; it will have major impact; it's a solution to a long-standing problem; and/or others will be interested.
Over time, published material has changed quite a lot. What was interesting research 15 years ago is wildly different today. Example cited was that Science once published the sequence of a newly-identified gene, then the genome, and more recently the genome as a tool and the genome as a network. (The network pictures of the genome looked remarkably like the networks we map in organizations.) Recent years have seen an absolute explosion in data, Jasny said, which has led to the journal tending to publish shorter articles with massive databases available online. Generally speaking, you don't get published if you won't make your data publicly available.
Jasny noted another major shift: the authorship of papers has evolved in the past 25 years. Where once a few chemists would team up, now bylines include people from a number of disciplines working on different aspects of a problem, then reporting their results together. Meanwhile, new fields are evolving, like neuroeconomics, microtubule dynamics, biomolecules in nanotechnology, geomicrobiology, and, music to the ears of those at the conference, systems approaches. Likewise, scientists are tackling more complex problems that fall under the rubric of "syndemics," like AIDS, which, in addition to the base science, requires study of gender discrimination, public fear, poverty, and government policy.
"And now we're seeing larger and larger collaborations," she said. One astronomy paper may take the world's record for number of authors: 350!
And lest you think they're all just abstruse scientists with no sense of fun, consider their newest feature by "The Gonzo Scientist," John Bohannon. His current project? He's living in a spacesuit for a month and reporting how it feels.
