Want 20,000 eyes focused on your next publication?

Abstract

Molecular Biology of the Cell’s (MBoC’s) electronic table of contents is delivered to more than 10,000 subscribers, including essentially all American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) members. This means that when you publish in MBoC, more than 20,000 eyes will focus on your work! If you are a cell biologist, these eyes belong to the readers who are arguably the most relevant target audience for your research. So what are you waiting for? Submit your next manuscript to MBoC, where it will be evaluated fairly and expeditiously and will have high visibility by cell biologists when published. Because MBoC exists to serve cell biologists, we are not looking for reasons to reject manuscripts. Rather, we endeavor to guide authors toward a successful outcome (manuscript acceptance) by providing objective evaluations, constructive feedback, and clarity on which improvements are required. Isn't this how the manuscript review process should work? Furthermore, because we refuse to bow down to the journal impact factor, we do not consider in our decision process how many citations a submitted manuscript is likely to attract, and we do not publish content, such as review articles, for the sole purpose of attracting citations. Rather, basic research articles are evaluated by peer reviewers and peer editors based only on completeness and rigor, leaving subjective judgments of impact and significance to future generations. Moreover, topics for Features articles are selected solely for the enlightenment of our community, without any consideration for how many citations they will attract. Fine examples of such Features articles can be found in this special 2013 ASCB Annual Meeting edition. This collection, edited by Features editors Bill Bement, Doug Kellogg, and Keith Kozminski, includes thought-provoking essays by ASCB award winners, whose important discoveries and exceptional service have inspired us all. Also included in this issue are several Perspectives focused on careers. The Perspectives by Doyle and Vale, Sandquist et al., and Yu, along with several that we have published previously (Zatz, 2011 ; Belmont, 2013 ; Fields, 2013 ; Machin, 2013 ), provide thoughtful firsthand perspectives on diverse career paths pursued by PhD cell biologists, as well as fascinating behind-the-scenes looks at what it is actually like to hold one of these positions. This year, the ASCB's executive director Stefano Bertuzzi and I were proud to share the SPARC Innovator Award (www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/innovator) with Mark Patterson, Bernd Pulverer, Mike Rossner, and numerous other journal publishers and editors who came together at the 2012 ASCB meeting to develop the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA; www.ascb.org/SFdeclaration.html). DORA challenges the obsession of many scientists, journals, administrators, and funding agencies with journal metrics, such as the journal impact factor, and advocates for a cultural change in which research articles are assessed based on their content, rather than on where they are published. The SPARC Innovator Award recognized the authors of DORA for “working to challenge the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities and the public.” You can add your support to the DORA movement by signing the declaration here: http://am.ascb.org/dora/index.php/sign-the-declaration. MBoC and the ASCB will be hosting a special panel discussion about DORA at the 2013 ASCB Annual Meeting. David G. Drubin, Editor-in-Chief