My attention span is shot. I mean, it was never great to begin with, but now between the mixed-up schedules, working from home with young kids, the barrage of constant mostly bad news, and a general, free-floating anxiety and uncertainty it’s particularly hard to… [long pause while staring into the middle distance] …focus.
That’s one of the many reasons I’m looking forward to the now-virtual CSE Annual Meeting next week. Program co-chairs, Emilie Gunn & Peter Olson, have managed to transform the full meeting program into a lean and exiting virtual meeting, covering such increasingly important topics as registered reports, publishing Chinese research, open access, improving peer review, and more. It’s just a few hours on May 4th and 5th, and it looks like it will easily keep my attention and yours.
I’m particularly eager to hear the Keynote and Plenary presentations, both of which are likely to have new resonance in these pandemic times. Brian Nosek’s Keynote on “Improving Openness and Reproducibility in Scholarly Communication” comes at a time when open science practices and the reliability of scientific research are being debated and discussed in the news and by the public daily. Likewise, Maryam Zaringhalam’s Plenary on “Storytelling for a More Equitable Open Science Enterprise” specifically speaks to the importance of a scientific enterprise that addresses the needs of the general public by emphasizing the human side of science. Maybe it’s seeing glimpses of people’s homes during online meetings or the candor being exhibited on social media during these rough times, but I feel like there is a growing appreciation that the people conducting, editing, publishing, and communicating science are, well, people, with lives and families and kids and pets and finances and worries and everything else that makes us human.
If you have yet to register, one of the benefits of the virtual meeting is that you can join much closer to the event than the in-person counterpart. Normally I wouldn’t bother encouraging meeting attendance just a few days out, knowing that few are going to make arrangements, book a flight, and find a hotel room on such short notice, but hey, you don’t have to do any of that now. So register today, and I hope to see you at one of the virtual happy hours!
-Jonathan Schultz
Editor-in-Chief, Science Editor
REMINDER: Science Editor Pandemic Dispatches is your opportunity to share your experiences and thoughts as you and your organizations adapt to this ever-changing landscape. We’re interested in collecting everything and anything you may want to share: tips and tricks, interesting anecdotes, light-hearted stories, new insights, thoughts on the future and where we’ll be in a year, and more. The link to the form, which you are welcome to share with colleagues, is as follows: https://forms.gle/TsQNCuNk3N64gq7j7
New Issue!
The Spring 2020 issue of Science Editor posted recently, and the print version will mail out soon so, for many of you, it can sit at your office until you’re allowed to return. The cover is a magician’s poster from early in the last century; that may not seem like a typical cover image for Science Editor, but I hope the connection will make sense when you read my introductory Viewpoint “Notes on Transparency: An Elusive, and Illusive, Goal.”
Quarantine bonus activity! For no particular reason, I hid a reference as an acrostic to a thematically appropriate early 90s movie in the Viewpoint. If you find it and remember the movie, let me know.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Call for Meeting Reporters
We still have a few slots available for (virtual) Annual Meeting Session reporters. Reports on the CSE Annual Meeting sessions are very important to the readers of Science Editor, especially those who cannot attend the meeting or a concurrent session. Serving as an Annual Meeting Reporter is a great way for first-time attendees or newer members to become involved in CSE and a chance to have an article published in Science Editor.
If you are interested in serving as a meeting reporter, please email us at scienceeditor@councilscienceeditors.org and we’ll provide additional info.
Resource of the Month
Being an editor and working at scientific publication requires being ever knowledgeable of a rapidly changing scientific and publishing landscape, so each month we highlight a resource that will hopefully make this at least a little bit easier.
You can’t have a CSE Annual Meeting without a Short Course, so a virtual meeting calls for a virtual Short Course: Advanced Short Course on Publication Management on May 6. Topics include Promoting Integrity in the Editorial Office; Changing/Restructuring an Editorial Office Team; Engaging Early Career Professionals; and Data-Driven Decisions in the Editorial Office. Knowing the faculty for this Short Course, it’s sure to be an enlightening and engaging experience.
New Online Article
In her new Gatherings of an Infovore column, Barbara Meyers Ford delves into the topic of author contributions and asks “Who Deserves CRediT?” The seemingly random capitalization is a clue that we’re talking about the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT), of course, and Barbara provides a helpful overview of what that means along with a collection of related resources and articles.
A Call for a Universal Time Zone
With all meetings being virtual, it is a perfect opportunity to switch the world to one Universal Time Zone. Instead of a confusing patchwork of time zones with differing daylight and standard times, there should be one time that’s the same for everyone no matter the time of year; eg, 8:00 is 8:00 everywhere. Think about it: the CSE Meeting starts at 11:30 Eastern Daylight Time; if someone is joining from the UK what time is that? Have they switched to DST yet? What about Arizona, San Francisco, Madrid, or Mumbai? Why bother with any of that when you could just say the meeting starts at 11:30 and that would be the case no matter where you are in the world. I realize that some who read this will scoff, but the next time you miss an important meeting because of time zone confusion, you will think of this and become a convert.
(I have long advocated for this to anyone who would listen, and HT to eLife EIC Michael Eisen for broaching this important topic on Twitter.)
Feedback and suggestions are always welcome at scienceeditor@councilscienceeditors.org.
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