Required reading

Earlier this year Heather drew attention to Vivian Siegel’s editorials on supporting outreach efforts and on authorship and acknowledgement. I’m ashamed to say I did not see Heather’s post at the time but am pleased to find it now as I recently had the pleasure of meeting Vivian Siegel, and hearing her give an excellent talk entitled “How to get published (in a high profile journal)”.
Vivian is editor of a new journal, DMM: Disease Models & Mechanisms, published by the estimable Company of Biologists, and was previously chief editor at Cell and then executive director and one of the launch editors of PLoS Biology. So she does know something about high profile journals and about editing. Currently she is Director of the Center for Science Communication at Vanderbilt University. The Center aims “to help authors of basic biomedical research publish better papers in better journals, and to help potential editors gain experience and improve their skills”. One example is the Vanderbilt editors’ club, described in an article in DMM. This is a group of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students that offers editing services, free of charge, to Vanderbilt faculty and trainees.
Anyway, it seems to me that her editorials in DMM are becoming required reading. Thus far she has written on:

• Online tools for radical collaboration
• The long tail in scientific communication
• Drinking from the firehose of scientific publishing
• Public engagement
• Authorship and acknowledgement
• Peer review and publishing – this includes advice to authors on how to get published

• Her path to DMM, and what it aims to do

All of these are available for free at present.
In short, if you are interested in scientific publishing and scientific communication then get along to DMM and have a read.
Oh, and if you want to know how to get published etc, these were her five bullet points:

• Do important work
• Write well (be sure to use presubmission enquiries and a covering letter)
• Write strategically, for the reviewers
• Make the editor your advocate

• Understand the decision