Competition Is Intense For Jobs In Science Journal Publishing

These days, with funding for research far from assured, scientists are seeking alternative careers that provide opportunities for them to continue using their scientific training and remain in touch with their fields. One such alternative is journal publishing, a natural venue for those researchers who have a way with words. The 1,200-member, Chicago-based Council of Biology Editors, established in 1957 by a joint action of the National Science Foundation and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, provides resources for journal editors in the life sciences, offers a means for them to collaborate, and fosters "effective communication practices," according to its mission statement. The group sponsors an annual meeting (next year's gathering, scheduled to take place in Kansas City, Mo., in May, will focus on the challenges of the electronic aspects of publishing) and publishes a style manual for life-sciences journals, as well as a newsletter. Council of Biology Editors 11 S. La Salle St., Suite 1400 Chicago, Ill. 60603 Phone: (312) 201-0101 Fax: (312) 201-0214 President: Bradley Hundley Managing Director: Cindy Clark Generalizations about editorial jobs are risky. While some journals rely on part-timers or even volunteers to handle editing tasks, others--particularly those in medicine--remunerate their editors handsomely: Several of them offer salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Still, it's only the weekly and biweekly medical journals that have a need for full-time scientific editors, as opposed to the monthlies and quarterlies, which use part-timers. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), for instance, has five full-time positions and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has seven. But these are the United States' largest medical journals and are the exception, not the rule. Edward Huth, who served as edit or-in-chief of the Annals of Internal Medicine for 19 years, says that, in all of the world's English-language medical journals, there are only 25 or 30 physicians editing full-time. Understandably, the competition for full-time slots is stiff. Recently, when NEJM advertised for a deputy editor, 60 physicians,all prominent in their fields, applied. Researchers come to publishing through a variety of routes. Huth, who started at the Annals in 1965 as an associate part-time editor and moved up to editor-in-chief in 1971, calls his career switch "one of those accidents of life." While Huth was conducting kidney-function investigations at the University of Pennsylvania, a colleague was tapped to be editor-in-chief at the Annals and asked him to sign on, too. Huth had written for a college magazine and decided to give it a try. He retired from the Annals in 1990 but recently came out of retirement to "hold things together" when his successors, Robert and Suzanne Fletcher, took positions at Harvard Medical School. NEJM editor-in-chief Jerome Kassirer had a long track record in publishing before taking his present job. He had coedited the monthly "Nephrology Forum" for 14 years at the journal Kidney International, edited a column called "Clinical Problem Solving" for the Journal of Hospital Practice, and served as editor-in-chief of a textbook, Current Therapy in Internal Medicine (St. Louis, Decker, 1991). In 1974 Peter Newmark, a chemist in the United Kingdom who felt stuck in a tedious area, left a lecturer's position to become the biology editor at Nature. Now he is managing director of Current Biology Ltd. in London. The company publishes nine journals; Newmark personally edits and publishes Current Biology. In addition, the company produces books and databases and will soon be putting out CD-ROMs. Editors of life-sciences journals can network and get assistance from the Chicago-based Council of Biology Editors (see accompanying story). Some journals use deputy and associate full-time editors to supervise the scientific side of editing research papers. They make certain that the syntax is clear, the research designs are adequate, and the conclusions are justifiable. In addition, they sometimes write editorials. And most journals have a copy editor--NEJM has seven. These individuals have extensive editing backgrounds, some with a little science thrown in, but most with undergraduate credentials. They dot the is and cross the ts and get paid on a baccalaureate scale. Because there are so few jobs available, "earning a living at journal editing is a long shot," says George Lundberg, who is in his 13th year as JAMA's editor-in-chief. But it is a good living for some, notes NEJM's Kassirer. Salary depends on experience and the candidate's previous income, he points out. "If I brought in a cardiologist who was making $130,000, I'd pay him that, where I would pay an endocrinologist a little less." Adds Lundberg: "It's all a matter of negotiation based on supply and demand." Huth guesses that the pay ranges from $100,000 to $250,000 per year and parallels what physicians in diverse specialties with wide-ranging experience could earn teaching. Various arrangements exist for the part-timers who occupy the vast majority of editorial positions. Most have university jobs and edit, too. Some part-timers are paid on top of their university salaries, while the journal picks up a share of the university salary for others. Still others edit gratis, to learn and obtain experience. Even though there are a lot of part-time positions, getting one is not easy. One reason, according to Lundberg, is that there may be only a handful of journals in a re-searcher's specialty. On top of that, editors may stay for five to 10 years. Journals that are published by scientific societies are able to keep staffing costs low, according to William J. Whelan, editor-in-chief of the FASEB Journal, a publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Whelan, a full-time professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Miami School of Medicine, works part-time out of his academic office for the journal and has 20 percent of his university salary paid by FASEB. Such an arrangement is economical "because generally the institution is not demanding any overhead for space [and other costs], and many of these journals are subsidized in that way," notes Whelan, who also was involved in starting FEBS Letters, the European Journal of Biochemistry, and several other publications. "I must say that, in comparison with private journals like Nature, we have much smaller and leaner staffs." He adds that a way to reduce costs and thus keep subscription costs low is to "limit the number of people you need in the central office and then spread your work out to the other [outside] editors. We pay the editors a small fee for each manuscript they handle--we are paying for the mail or faxes [and so forth], but nobody makes a dime out of it." The take from outside biomedicine is a little different. J.P. Keener, who edits the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, is a volunteer. Keener, a professor of mathematics at the University of Utah, notes that the math community is small and has little money. In mathematics "I don't see the opportunity for anyone to make a living editing," he says. More promising is Physical Review Letters (PRL). Although the chief editor is part-time, there are six full-time senior editing positions for people with Ph.D.'s in physics, according to Stanley Brown, a senior editor at the journal. Starting salaries are competitive with postdoctoral stipends in the field. Still another way of allocating editing chores is found at the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), which publishes 25 journals. Twelve part-time editors, all of whom have full-time teaching positions, keep the wheels turning. According to Charles Bertsch, who heads up ACS's journals department, ACS's part-time editors are paid anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000 per year, depending on the journal's circulation, size, and number of associate editors. Allan Bard, the part-time editor-in-chief, has presided over JACS for 13 years, although the term is usually five years. JACS looks for people with a demonstrated record of scholarship. These individuals do not apply for jobs at the journal but are tapped by a search committee. Of course, not everyone is suited to editing. Huth says the most important qualities to have are a firm grasp of the nature of scientific evidence, a broad knowledge of the field, and a journalistic instinct to know when to publish something "that may not stand up, but is substantial and provocative enough to merit an airing." Kassirer, on the other hand, emphasizes administrative ability and past editing experience. There are drawbacks, too. Lundberg cautions that editors attract controversy: While they are considered the friend of those whose papers they accept, they are often viewed as the enemy of those they reject. And then there's the isolation, says Huth. Although editors-in-chief are sometimes quite visible, they spend most of their time cooped up in an office. People accustomed to the activity of a large academic center often are not prepared to deal with the solitude, he warns. "You have got to recognize that it is a tyranny--that it goes on almost 365 days a year," cautions FASEB Journal's Whelan. "If you are away for a few days you are constantly in touch by fax because you can't hold manuscripts up--you always have to meet deadlines. "You have to accept that it is very demanding and you can't put it down even for a short time, otherwise things are going to go wrong. You are a vital link between the authors and the production office, and the production office is always screaming politely to meet their deadlines." Still, for an editor-in-chief, the job can be pretty heady. Huth points out that it's a chance to be visible. It also provides a forum to say what one thinks almost without contradiction and an opportunity to develop national positions on issues in ways that the average academic can't. Not insignificantly, the job carries considerable clout. "If you are with an important journal, you decide what information is provided to large numbers of readers and to a substantial extent set the agenda for medicine and health care in the country," comments Lundberg. One drawback to editing, according to PRL's Brown, is rejecting papers from scientists one knows personally. When he signed on during the job crunch of the 1970s, he recalls, he was immediately faced with rejecting a former office-mate, but had someone else write the letter. "Since then I've become more calloused," he says. Editing isn't all rejection, however. Brown reports that he gets a good overview of physics, is involved in publishing important research, and gets to rub shoulders with smart and interesting people. "And it's a way to keep in touch with physics and still get paid for it," he notes, something he wasn't sure he would be able to do because of the tight job situation when he finished his dissertation in the 1970s. The biggest negative for JACS's Bard is the time editing takes from his other work. When he's busy, he acknowledges, "I am less than happy to spend time on other people's papers." He has also found that, while most scientists accept how the system works, now and then a simple rejection ends up straining personal relationships. Even so, Bard likes the work. Through editing he sees the big picture in chemistry: "I get to learn a lot about modern frontier science and the people doing it." Current Biology's Newmark says his chemistry training has helped him enormously because it has given him a feeling for science and has enabled him to "talk the talk" with the scientists whose work he publishes. But he says that the power of persuasion, or the ability to develop it, is the most important quality for a would-be editor to have. Whether it's editing journals, writing books, or reviewing papers, he says, "a lot of publishing is persuading busy academics to do things that they really don't have time to do." For the researcher who wants to make the switch, Newmark thinks the most important thing is to send a grammatically correct application letter. He also wants to see some evidence that the applicant has previously shown an interest in publishing. JAMA's Lundberg recommends first getting on an editorial board to learn about the journal and "so they can learn about you." Competition for jobs with physics journals is arduous because there is currently a job crunch in the discipline, according to PRL's Brown. He reports that he has seen several hundred applications in recent months. He advises job-seekers not to get their hopes up about a job at his journal. On occasions when he does have a job open, Brown says, he looks for someone with at least some postdoctoral experience and some writing inclination, even as little as having worked on a student newspaper. "It shows they have an interest in communication and words," he comments. Academics sometimes come up short in two areas, according to Newmark. First, they often don't have a bottom-line mentality, thinking that a journal will sell automatically because it is good or important. "You can produce a wonderful [publication] and not sell it," says Newmark, "because you neglect the marketing." The other mistake, he cautions, is to assume that a publishing job carries with it employment security. "You don't come here and get a job for life," he says. "You succeed or you don't." Paul McCarthy is a freelance science writer based in Honolulu.

Competition Is Intense For Jobs In Science Journal Publishing

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