Genetics and Health

Genetics Interview #10: Dr. Alan Packer of Nature Genetics

by Hsien Hsien Lei, PhD on August 3rd, 2006

As you’re reading this, I’ll be winging my way to California for my annual trip back “home”. Fortunately, Dr. Alan Packer of Nature Genetics is here with us in spirit today in the tenth interview of the Genetics and Health interview series. I can imagine that more than one of you out there would like to pick his brain and ask why your paper got rejected! ;)

1. Many scientists are interested in life outside of academia, how did you get into publishing and what do you like best about it? What do you like least?

I have always had broad interests in science—the sort of interests that tend to get pushed aside as one is forced to focus on one or two particular projects. I always liked journal clubs, reading the literature, and thinking about the way journals are put together. As a postdoc, I wrote some science news and book reviews as a freelancer, as an outlet for some of these interests. Toward the end of my postdoc, I spent several months applying and interviewing for academic positions, but didn’t receive an offer. It occurred to me at that point that even if I did receive an offer, it might not be terribly attractive, given how difficult it can sometimes be for young investigators to secure funding for a new research program, especially if one’s publication record (like mine) is respectable, but not spectacular. So I sent an application to Nature Genetics, and luckily they happened to be looking for an assistant editor at the time. I got the job and started a couple of months later.

There are several things that I like about publishing. I work with a very bright group of people, all with very broad interests themselves. I get to read some great science, before most other people get to read it. I get the regular satisfaction of helping to edit and produce a monthly journal (weekly online) that is quite influential. I attend conferences and visit scientists in their labs, where I talk with them about the latest things they’re working on. I do all of these very enjoyable things, and still feel like a scientist, without having to run gels at 10 o’clock at night. While the thrill of getting a result in the lab is unbeatable, all in all it was a good decision for me.

What I like least is rejecting a paper that I know is very good and close to ‘clearing the bar’, but has to be declined because of the fierce competition for space in the journal. We all know how much it can mean for people looking for jobs, grants, promotions etc., and no one likes to give bad news, especially when the work has much to recommend it. I should add that sometimes an acceptance in a journal like Nature Genetics means too much, and I hope hiring and promotion committees are looking less at the perceived quality of the journal and more at the actual quality of the work produced by the author.

2. The day I found the Nature Genetics blog Free Association was pretty exciting for me. Why did Nature decide to start blogs and what did you think of the idea at the start? Has your opinion changed?

If memory serves, my first discussion about possibly starting a blog at Nature Genetics was a few years ago with Charles Jennings, former executive editor for the Nature research journals. Nothing much came of it for some time, but last year Myles Axton, chief editor at NG, encouraged me to give it a go. A few colleagues elsewhere in the Nature Publishing Group were interested in starting their own blogs, and there are now several up and running. The primary reason I was interested in starting a blog is that I had become somewhat addicted to a few blogs as a reader, and I thought it might be fun to write for one. There also seemed to be a bit of a vacuum in science blogging, though in the last few months that vacuum has started to be filled. It has certainly been fun, although it has to be said that we’re doing this ‘on the side’, and there’s never enough time to post as regularly we’d like.

3. Has the response to Free Association surprised you? What are your plans for the blog? I have to admit that I would love to read more behind-the-scenes posts and editors’ viewpoint.

I’m a bit disappointed, if not terribly surprised, that we haven’t been able to generate much comment and discussion. Information overload is a problem, I’m sure, and our readers are very busy people. Perhaps I’ll have to post something really outrageous to get some feedback! You raise a good point about the appeal of behind-the-scenes posts. While much of what we do is confidential peer review, which doesn’t lend itself to the public nature of blogging, we can certainly describe what we do on a daily basis in more general terms. Look for some ‘day in the life’ of an editor posts in the near future. I would also like to continue with our occasional ‘Paper trail’ series, in which the author of a recent NG paper gives some additional background and history.

Pssst, Alan. Comments still aren’t showing up at Free Association. At least five of my last comments have been eaten.

4. Nature remains (stubbornly?) a fee-for-service journal both online and off. What do you think of open-access (but still peer-reviewed) journals like the PLoS Genetics? Will Nature ever allow people like me who no longer have institutional access to read full articles?

I like both PLoS Biology and PLoS Genetics very much, and I think they’re publishing some excellent papers. They’re certainly on our must-read list every month when we’re looking for work to summarize on our ‘Research Highlights’ page. As for Nature, my guess is that it will remain a ‘reader pays’ journal for the foreseeable future. The primary reason is that it costs a great deal of money to produce. One thing that may not be apparent from the outside is what it takes to produce a journal with the richness of filtering, content, and context that Nature offers, both in print and online. The people who look at the numbers make the argument that the amount of money each author would have to be charged to in order to meet this cost would be prohibitive. I’m not privy to those numbers, but I do see the scale of the operation every day, and I’m not at all surprised by this conclusion. That said, I’m not sure I would use the word ‘stubborn’ to describe Nature’s position. A lot of people here have taken a good hard look at the different publishing models. There is a journal under the NPG umbrella called Molecular Systems Biology that is open access (author pays), which is in part an experiment to see if such a publishing model really is viable in the long run. There is also a great deal of NPG content that is freely available, and if you go through the ‘subject area’ pages, you’ll see it. We’re also a member of HINARI, a consortium of publishers that provides low cost access to the journals in countries whose GDP is below a certain level.

There may be some who argue that all of the bells and whistles (the ‘added value’) are unnecessary, and we could just slap the papers up on the web with no frills. But most of the people I’ve spoken with in the community recognize that what the Nature journals offer (and Science, and Cell) is valuable, and worth paying for.

5. The peer-review process comes under fire on a regular basis. What would you say to those who believe “open” media/medicine/authoring, e.g., blogging, will take the place of peer-review by qualified scientists and experts?

I’d say it depends on the kind of model you’re talking about, and also on exactly what you’d be asking of it. If review of the paper is thrown open to everyone, regardless of qualifications, I think you’d get some excellent input, as well as a lot of worthless comments. If the paper were already deemed publishable, but you opened it up for public review just to see what everyone thought of the paper, such a process might be quite interesting. But if you’re using public review to decide on publication in a particular journal, that might be a train wreck. How do you distill 30 or 50 or 100 reviews into something that an author can digest and use to revise the paper? It’s hard enough with 3 reviews. I suppose it would make sense to run an experiment on open review, and Nature is doing just that. See http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/index.html for the details.

Who knows? Maybe it will work well. My only bias is that peer review as it stands now is better than its critics make it out to be. It’s not perfect, but we get so many superb, thoughtful reviews, that I would have to be thoroughly convinced with hard data before I would recommend implementing another system. One last thought on open review. We don’t prohibit referees from signing their reviews—it’s an option that’s available to them. Of all the different reviewers that we’ve used in my stint at Nature Genetics (well over a thousand, I’d guess), how many do you think have taken this option? The answer is three. I think that tells you something.

Thanks for asking me to do this. Good luck with the blog!

Thanks, Alan, for taking the time out to share your thoughts on the world of science publishing! Hope you don’t mind me showing your picture. Sometimes it feels as if editors at elite publications are demi-gods in the tower. Being able to put a name to a face is a reminder that in the end, science is about people and making the world a better and more interesting place.

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POSTED IN: Genetics Interviews