Message from the President

Does it matter what scientific journal you publish your latest findings in?

Many journals associated with non-profit scientific societies have been around for decades (some for over a century) and represent the gold standard in their fields. However, since 2000 there has been a massive proliferation of for-profit journals that have made it challenging for society journals to maintain their pipeline of submissions.

When I was a post-doc in the lab of Bob Lefkowitz at Duke in the 1990’s, we usually sent our hottest findings to Nature or Science for consideration. However, any paper that was not accepted at these general-interest journals was typically sent next to a society journal like Molecular Pharmacology, the Journal of Biological Chemistry or the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In fact, most of the key papers comprising the body of work for which Bob won the Nobel Prize in 2012 were published in society journals.

Things are different these days. When a lab has a paper turned down by Nature, they are invited by the publisher to submit the paper to another journal in the Nature portfolio. If that journal also turns the paper down, then the paper can be submitted within the Nature system to yet ANOTHER Nature journal, and so on and so on. Cascades of for-profit journals are certainly good at enhancing profits for private publishers, but unfortunately they’re bad for non-profit scientific societies because they interfere with the pipeline of papers that has traditionally flowed to society journals.

Prior to 1992, there was only one journal in the Nature portfolio: Nature. Now, there are more than 150 journals in the portfolio. Other for-profit publishers, including Cell Press, Frontiers Media and others, have undergone similarly logarithmic growth in their numbers of journals. Don’t even get me started about the surging numbers of predatory journals out there that charge authors high prices for publication while providing little or no peer review and shoddy editing.

When you publish in a society journal that has stood the test of time, it is clear to all that your work was rigorously peer-reviewed and expertly edited. Moreover, revenues from the society’s journals help support causes important to the scientific community: travel awards for students, advocacy efforts to promote research funding, public outreach about science issues, and much, much more. So, it turns out that there ARE crucial differences between publishing in journals that are strictly for-profit and publishing in journals associated with non-profit scientific societies like ASPET.

Please consider submitting your next exciting paper to a society journal, especially an ASPET journal!

Sincerely,