All right, while we're getting set up, I'll just do a quick intro and put on some information for discussion. So my name is Matt Sikora, I'm an assistant professor at University of Colorado, and I'm happy to moderate, I guess, today, with our esteemed editor panel. Dr. Carol Lange is EIC at Endocrinology, Dr. Zeynep Medek Erdogan is EIC at Journal of Endocrine Society, and Dr. Raghu Miramira is going to join us shortly, and he's deputy editor at JCEM. I'll just put up, I'll leave this up for a few moments. A lot of the discussion we're going to have today is based on some thoughts on publishing and the publishing process that Dr. Lange and Dr. Medek Erdogan have both published with our current, our new endo-president, Dr. Stephen James. I'll come back to these QR codes in a minute, if you want to scan those. But when we start discussion, I'm just going to leave these topics up for a bit. The four of us kind of just collectively identified some points we thought would be worth discussion, but since it's a small group, especially, we'll let everybody just drive the conversation and what you all want to talk about. But here's some ideas that we had up. I'll go back to the QR codes for a moment, if anybody wants it, and then I'll go back. But Zeynep, you were going to do an intro or something? Sure. My name is Zeynep Medek Erdogan, I'm an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Louisville-Urbana-Champaign. I'm also an intern chief of the Journal of Mental Health Society. Hi, I'm Carol Lange, an intern chief of endocrinology. I think I entered my fourth year doing that. I'm at the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center, where I'm a professor of medicine and oncology. I also run a large training grant at NIH-Mendocin32, Vogelstein Cancer, and I'm the associate director for basic science for my cancer center, and other hats, various hats of leadership around Vogelstein training development and leadership development, and I love doing that. And I have edited Hormones and Cancer, which was an endocrine society journal that they sold to Springer Nature, and then I took a little break and was asked to come back for endocrinology, so it's been really fun. Yeah, and then Dr. Pamera is at his post-docs talk, and then he's going to be about 15 minutes late to join us. He'll be here too, and he's the associate editor of endocrine, what is it? Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. JCE. JCE. It's a great journal. Yeah, maybe I'll tell you a little bit about my journey to the JCE. I've been on the editorial boards of several journals, and then several years ago, I was approached by Alsevier to start a new journal on endocrinology and metabolic science. I knew I had no experience, they were just establishing it. But it was great, because it gave a lot of experience on handling papers, the big stage really. And then the abortion did just open, and here we are. Oh, we are getting more people, so hey, come on in. Maybe pull up a chair. We've decided to have a more interactive discussion. We were up there, but the lights were too bright. A little bit late. Must have been a session that got a little bit late. All right. Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, the Endocrine Society does everything within seven or eight journals. Very democratically, they have a large publication core committee. And the publication core committee is made up of members, and we have tremendous editorial staff to help us. It is really nice that that committee makes all of the kind of rules, so the editors don't, we don't, we're not cowboys, we don't get to make it up as we go along, we have to follow the best practices and guidelines set forth by the Endocrine Society and the publication core committee. And that makes it really easy for us, and we have fantastic managing editors at the Endocrine Society. Maggie Hayworth and Tim Beardsley are the ones that help me, and they also, they have several journals in their portfolios. So it's just, it's really nice to be in a society journal where you have great support. They're also very stable journals. They have longevity. And I think they're very fair. Our goal is to publish things fast and objectively. We don't have a page limit. It's free for members. So it's just really nice to be an editor for an Endocrine Society journal, and there's a lot of differences with private journals. But any of these topics, we kind of thought of topics sort of like a Jeopardy approach. So you guys tell us what topic you'd like to open with, and we can kind of chat about that. I'm going to ask one question. My name is Mitotsugi Nagao. I'm from Japan. So I've just become an associate professor. Now I also have an editor role in one journal. So I'd like to ask you about how busy you are. Because I actually can't imagine about the society journal editor. How much papers? Are you handling in a week or something? You want to go first? Yeah, sure. So as editor-in-chief, I don't handle papers. There are associate editors who probably are at that level. And they tend to have from two to three papers to sometimes six, seven papers per month. Depending on the topic. Oh, month. Depending on the topic. Some topics are more... We receive a lot more submissions. Et cetera. But what I do is when there's a conflict. When there are issues with review. Issues with the authors, for example. That's when I step in, really. So, I mean, it's work. Because we have to keep an eye on what's submitted, how it's going, are the times okay. And in certain cases, I step in as the third reviewer or second reviewer, whatever is needed. One thing that I liked, what Carol said, is society journals. The quality is really the main thing. So when a paper is submitted, the editorial staff, they really go through things. Including if the authors are really who they are. Those kind of checks are made. So, yeah, I mean, I think we have a lot of kind of safety nets. That enable us to really focus on the papers and the quality of science that we receive. Sorry about that. No, they're recording. compared to us, so yeah. Thank you. Okay, so we get about 500 submissions a year. So in a month, in a month it can be 50, 40, 50, all the way up to 80, 90, but usually it's somewhere around 50, 60. And, you know, like we, I have 14 associate editors by expertise. And those papers, after they go through their checks, get sorted to those AEs. And then we ask them to make a decision whether or not to reject or send out within three days. I prefer one day, but they, so they're getting an email notification that says they need to go look online. I just look every night to see what's going on. I look every night, it's like 10 minutes. You get on, you see what's going on. If you're at a private journal or a very small journal, like when I was at Hormones and Cancer, I did everything. I had no AEs. So I did have to sort papers and push papers, and I had to find other reviewers. So much more work than a society journal where you have managing editors doing all these things, and you have a lot of AEs. So basically my main time, the time that I need to spend is inviting. So they want me to invite content. So I'm gonna be trying to invite many reviews and research articles. I'm gonna be networking at poster sessions, going to meetings, trying to drum up submissions. So I go on PubMed and search around for hot topics and search for authors, and I cold call. And almost no one responds, because we all get too many. But I've kind of run out. I've been there four years. I've kind of run out of my friends, colleagues, their dogs. I mean, I'm looking for any, so everyone's sick of me. They've run the other direction when I ask them for a paper. But that's what we're trying to do is get more papers so that the job of sorting out who's gonna review it and deciding whether or not we're gonna review it, it goes to our AEs. So then you have to, with every journal, it's a little bit different. So you have to kind of weigh, you have to ask those questions when you agree to do it. How many papers do you think I'm gonna see a month? What else am I gonna have to do? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I like to see a reject without review or send it out within a day or two. I mean, I know maybe it won't happen over the weekend or over a holiday, but I don't want it to sit there for 10 days. And it depends on the schedule of the AEs too, right? So if they are clinicians, they have other duties. Some are in New Zealand. So there, I mean, there's quite a time. Yeah. I think we have one or two Chinese and one or two Japanese. I think we have on our board for sure. We try to have a very diverse and global board of editors and associate editors. Hard to, well, hard to calculate. I don't, well, I mean, when I did the calculation, it was coming to like 30% of what I'm doing for my actual job, you know, about 30%. I mean, when you go and, you know, look through things and, you know, all the discussions, you know, we end up having some discussion sessions and then sometimes, you know, something pops up. I write to Tim, he writes back. I mean, if you consider all of those, right? So, but I guess I'm spending less time now. At the beginning, it was a lot more, you know, till I had a feel about it and things started rolling okay. So, yeah. Yeah, I think I'm probably at, I'm probably at 15% and my, you know, when I have a grant due, it goes down to five or 10. And when I'm, when I kind of go in spurts, that's how I work anyway. So, it can be 25% or 5%. It just depends on what's going on. And I usually tell Maggie and Tim, you know, I'm gonna be kind of underground because I have this thing going on and they're really accommodating. And then I have time, I decided it's better just to block time in my calendar. So, it'll be like invites. It'll just say invites for one hour on Friday morning. And then I'm plunking around on PubMed trying to find cool people to invite, nice people, you know, people to invite. And then I send off a bunch of emails and then I hope that they respond. So, but I'll eat up that hour pretty quickly. So, if I don't put that in my calendar, I won't do it. Can you talk about picking the right journal and why in chronology, why came here? They are awesome. And very fast, I would say, I think overall. That's coming from my scientist self, you know. When I submit to society journals, they tend to be much faster than the private journals. Because it is very important for us, that time to decision, right? We tend to push our AEs to get to that decision quicker. So, apart from that, it's very visible as a society journal, right? So, the members tend to receive emails monthly. We also do, for example, featured articles that we tend to share in social media, for example. Yeah, so, and you know, if a paper is accepted to one of the society journals, it's a good paper. It has visibility and hopefully, it will have long-lasting impact. I mean, Carol will tell you probably about that, but there are papers that are still cited from like 50 years ago. Like, it's amazing, yeah. I mean, I would say that these society journals, and even other society journals like the American Association for Cancer Research and the Society for, what is it? Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, JBC. These are very long-lived, very stable. They may not have the highest impact factor, but you know you're gonna get rigorous, timely review. Members get benefits for the endocrine society, though you don't pay page charges. It's going to be no page limit for our journals. I think all of our, no. So, endocrinology, no page limit, no figure limit. So, if you have a really complete story and you don't want to have to skim it down to five or six figures, you can go to endocrinology. There are a lot of Nobel Laureate work that's in mole-endo and endocrinology. So, mole-endo and endo merged some time ago, but you can still index all of those papers. So, I just think that they're very objectively reviewed. There's a lot of oversight and good communication with the authors. The timing is great. We are at an impact factor of five right now. We just came over five recently. But I've been publishing in that journal since I was a postdoc, and some of my most highly cited papers are in that journal and you have a large society. I think our membership is 19,000. You're going to capture a broad audience. When you submit a paper, you really want to think about who your audience will be and who you want to see your paper, and that might change which journal you decide to put it in. So, usually you kind of say, okay, pick three journals that seem to have the right flavor. Go read their scope statement. Look at those journals online or in person and kind of flip through and see what kind of papers are there, and kind of think of your target audience for the highest number of citations. Other way to get your citations up is to make sure your title and your abstract contain the key words for your field. And sometimes people overlook that and their titles become quite thick or eclectic sounding. You want to make sure your title is tight and contains the key words. That might be your disease you're studying or your condition you're studying, your model system, and some of the key molecules should appear in your title. And then make sure your abstract has all those key words. And then when you are asked to give key words, make sure you're choosing key words that will capture all of your audience, probably including your model system. And that way, your paper will be seen and it'll get better citations. And then when we feature, we put it on social media and that's sort of open access for a short period of time. So there's a lot of ways to get your papers more visible that way that are easy. And I'll just say when cancer research, it used to have an impact factor hovering around five or six. And when George Pendergrass became the editor, he, every single paper, he changed the title and the abstract. He edited the abstract personally and they came across his desk and he would make sure the title reflected what was in the paper and that the abstract contained the right key words. Within a very short period of time, that journal experienced a huge boost in the impact factor. Now it's around 11. And it was because he did that. And so that's why it's so important to make sure your abstract and your title have all the elements that are gonna be scanned when you're doing your, setting up your searches. Think about how you set up your searches and how your colleagues set up your searches and make sure those key words are there. My name is Raghu Miramira, and I'm at the University of Chicago, and I'm the deputy editor for JCEM. Well, you know, the one thing I will say, JCEM has a slightly different remit than the other two journals, and and, you know, the journal is obviously focused as much as possible on clinical studies, although some preclinical studies, as they relate to a clinical study, is appropriate. So, you know, if you have any, I mean, you could, you know, our journal probably, I think we receive about 4,500 submissions a year. We probably triage about 35 to 40 percent of those, so we never send those out to review. And I think the ones that we do send out to review are really the ones that, you know, are sort of focused on some sort of important clinical response, and as it relates to, you know, endocrinology, and endocrinology these days is pretty broad. So, you know, cancer to, you know, lipids and obesity are all part of endocrinology. So I would say that's one good reason to submit to our society journals, is just given the breadth of research that we publish. I'll just say to folks that have joined us later, the questions up here are just ideas. Our editors want to answer your questions, but feel free to pick something off the board, and in just a moment I'll go back and forth to some QR codes on some pieces in our endocrine journals that our editors have written on the process as well. I'll go back and forth a bit. Yeah, and I just wanted, you know, at JES recently we included health disparities research, as well as health services research, and endocrine disrupting chemicals as, you know, our topics of interest. And, you know, we try to really cover a broad interest group as much as possible, so that the research coming from the society is reflected in all aspects, basically. When I submit a paper to the society journal, always I should check whether I'm a society member or not. I'd like to know whether the editors know the status of their member or not. No? No, no care. But the people behind the scenes won't charge you as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of a benefit. Doesn't come into the decision tree, really. But be a member. Yeah, why not be a member? Yeah. Yeah, we don't say that we're serving members differently than non-members. There's no difference in how they're reviewed. But I do think as an editor, we're trying to serve our membership in general. We're trying to represent the endocrine society, and so our scope statements, I mean, I tried to make my scope statement as inclusive as possible to the membership of the endocrine society, and that was vetted with many people who made sure all the keywords were in there that cover what our society and our annual meeting covers. And my journal is a basic science journal. We do not take clinical trials or case reports or even small clinical observations unless they have a mechanistic advance along with that for basic science. And we changed the scope statement when I came in. We decided we were not going to be publishing either case reports or small clinical work, and that we would refer that. It's great work, but we're going to refer it out to the other journals. Yeah, and there is a new journal now specifically for case reports, JCM case reports. That was established last year, so most of those now go to that. And really, we deal with the primary research or clinical research articles as well as mini-reviews or expert opinions. Opinions, yeah. If you go to the journal websites, you'll see the type of articles, and there are a variety of them that might fit to the content that you would like to publish. Yeah, I mean, JES was established as the open access journal of the society. I think that's the really main thing. That's why we accept both clinical translation as well as basic research. Whereas JCM is more clinical and endocrinology is more basic, just right. Yeah, so. You have like a tighter. No, I don't think we have a limit. Yeah, I don't remember that being an issue. I mean, for particular article types, like perspectives are just 2400 words or mini reviews are 2500. But research articles, I don't, I have to go back and check. But as far as I know, we don't have a limit there neither. With everything being online, really, paid charges, you know, I mean, those things are not of interest. The only thing is the impact factor, right? So number of pages divided by citations. So that might be a way to maybe increase the impact factor. But we don't wanna do this because we want to have the good needed science in those papers that are published. Pick one. Pick one or come up with one of your own. Yeah. What are the main pitfalls that we see in the submissions that are common? Anyone? I'll start. I guess claiming that they are the first of reporting something or, you know, their data strongly shows this, and when you go to the data, it's not strongly showing that. So the claims, you have to be really mindful and careful about truly reflecting your data and also, I think, describing where your research fits within the history of that field. Those are the main ones that are really at least red flags for me. As a reviewer more than an editor, you know, if I see that, I'm like, no, this is not right. Something is wrong with this. Yeah, I think that this kind of easy ones are really read the scope statement a few times, make sure you're a good fit, because I reject a lot of stuff that's out of scope. I'm like, so they're spending all this time getting the format and sending it, and then it's out of scope. And you're like, oh, that doesn't fit our journal. You know, so there's that, and then really make sure the data, so I'll see data that doesn't have error bars or see bar graphs without error bars or without statistical rigor. So what I do is I'll read the abstract and the title, and I'll go right to the data. I won't do anything else. I'll look at the data, and I'll say, like, how good quality is this data? So really make sure the data presentation is really polished for font size and clarity and statistical significance and how you did that, because I'm going to be looking at the error bars, if there are them, if there's anything without that. Is it qualitative data? Is it quantitative data? What is it? And then if I decide the data just don't look very good, I'll probably reject it. Or if it's out of scope, I'll reject it. And then if it gets past kind of that and it looks like, oh, this is probably a pretty decent paper, you know, I'm looking for is it one cell line? Is it an in vitro study with one cell line, which I'm going to call phenomenology. I'm going to reject that. I'm going to want to see two or three model systems to repeat that. And then, you know, some journals, like Cancer Research, you can't even submit anymore unless you have at least one animal study. So you cannot submit an in vitro paper to Cancer Research anymore. They won't take it. You have to have in vivo and in vitro data. We don't do that in endocrinology. But I do want to see more than one cell line. I don't want to see a one-hit wonder. So I'm looking for that, too. I'm trying to say, did they publish all of this in one cell line? What does this mean? So at least two, usually three. But you want to have different ways of doing the experiment to show that you have rigor. When you ask the question pitfalls and submission, what do you mean exactly? Well, so I would say everything that they just said is correct. You know, make sure that, you know, that the English is good. I mean, if I can't get past the abstract, I'm not even going to read the rest. I'm not even going to look at the figures. It just goes back. Make sure that the figures look professional and not sloppy. You know, I think, and make sure that the title accurately reflects the contents. I mean, those are easy things to do, but those are also things that, if you don't do correctly, will get you rejected without even a review. It's got to be good. It's convinced me that it's professional. So, tell me what you mean by qualitative research. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, we, yeah, the question is, you know, more qualitative type research, for example, surveys and, you know, anything like that. I mean, I think we would like to see some outcomes of any sort with qualitative. So if you're going to be doing, you know, some chart reviews and, you know, following it up with, you know, surveys, it would be good to see some kind of a, sort of an outcome. As opposed, you know, we've had papers where, you know, you know, people don't follow up with a lot of the sort of, you know, maybe surveys that they send out or some of the work that they might mine through the electronic medical records. So I think it's really hard to say, you know, it's a case-by-case basis, I've got to say. But again, I think the same principles apply. That is, you know, you have, you know, an accurate title, a strong abstract, you know, a good sort of underlying, you know, our abstracts in JCEM, I don't know about your journals, are all structured, right? So they're structured abstracts. So pay very close attention to the structure and make sure that you have a background, you have a methodology, you have a result section, and you have a very clear conclusion, a very clear conclusion. You know, ideally, but again, I'm going to say that it largely depends on the study itself and what kind of a conclusion you can make. Yeah, I was going to say that might be the norm in your field. And so the savvy reviewers are going to know that, and we're going to do our best to match the reviewer expertise with the keywords that you submitted. And we have numerous ways of searching our giant database by classification, by keywords, by, you know, all kinds of ways. We do ask you to submit two or three names of people who would be qualified to review it. And sometimes we'll take one of those people, ask one of those people. But it's, you know, if your keywords are correct, and we're looking for reviewers, hopefully those reviewers are going to know that that's normative for your field. I think one thing that happens that I see a lot is I'll get a paper, and it'll seem like a least-publishable unit. It'll be an incremental advance. It'll be, you know, one or two experiments. And you're like, this really isn't a story yet. Go back and make this a story. What is the mechanistic advance? So for a basic science journal, you want a mechanistic advance. And sometimes I'll have to go on PubMed and do some research and see if that's a novel finding. Or maybe it's an observation without a mechanism. I get that a lot. This is a great observation, but we don't have a mechanistic advance. And I'll reject it for that reason. So go back and give me more. I don't do that too much, because my impact factor is five. Higher and higher impact factor journals are going to want more deeper mechanism, right? They're going to want more and more and more. So I'm trying to walk the line between accepting a diverse amount of papers and serving my membership. But I need to draw the line somewhere for a mechanistic advance. So I know I'm not science seller nature. But I also want to increase the quality in my journal. So I do see that a lot with tiny, tiny papers. And I go. That's why I'm looking at the data. I'm like, what do they have? What do they need? Sometimes they're very short papers with one or two figures. I'm like, really? Yeah. I mean, the only thing that I'll add is that I think it depends on what the paper reports, right? If it is a topic, and I can give an example, I'll make up one, COVID and cancer survivor experience, right? It's so novel. We know that there is not much beyond, you know, 2019. And it is of interest to a very wide array of audience, then, you know, we might be a little bit less strict because of the importance of that topic at the moment. But apart from that rigor, always quantitative outcome, right? So that is going to be very important for the reviewers, yeah. Yeah, do we read cover letters and do we like them? No, not really, not really. Yeah, don't waste your time. One page, if it needs to be submitted, just write, you know, this is what we report, just submit. We don't even see it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we look at abstract figures and abstract is so important. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we kind of got this question the other day. I think the cover letter is a thing of the past. Before there was an online submission, before you had, you know, these AIs that can read everything and kind of slot your paper into a slot and like automated stuff. And that's when you reach out to the editor and tell them what's so cool about your paper and who should review it and who shouldn't review it. And now that's kind of a checkbox on the online. You can kind of fill that in. So there's no, the cover letter is sort of gone by the wayside. It's still what? You could, if you want to. And that's really the managing editor who probably does read that. I know Tim Beardsley will read that because I know Tim so well. He's very, very, very conscientious and thorough and he's going to read the cover letter, but we never see it. And it doesn't go into any kind of decision whether or not review it or not. But, you know, he might see that and it'll help him know which AE to send it to. Yeah, don't worry about that. Don't worry about it. I think, you know, I mean, since we received the same question in the two sessions, maybe we should just ask them if it is time to completely get rid of cover letters at this point. Maybe we are missing something. They have, you know, some reason to keep them, but yeah. I remember the last time I got one. Yeah, but I always write them. I do write them for my, you know, I write them for other journals that my people in my lab want to send their work out. We always get a cover letter draft together. We keep it very, very short. Preprint, I mean it doesn't even come to my attention generally. It's great if it is preprinted and we will be obviously accepting preprinted papers. Pre-submission inquiries are great because that directly tells me whether or not what's going to be reported in that paper is going to fit into our scope. And then we will be more enthusiastic if it is a good fit. Please go ahead and submit if it is something of interest. So I like pre-submission inquiries really and I read them and try to respond to them pretty quickly. I do too. And they come to us as editors in our email. They don't route through a bunch of people. We get them right away, which is really nice. And I try to answer them immediately as soon as I see them because you can kind of read down and go, oh yeah, that sounds great, I'd love to have that. Or you're like, you know, that's a clinical thing, why don't you try JES or JCEM. You know, you kind of guide them to another journal. But I really like direct contact with members. I really like that. Yeah, I've gotten a few, not a lot. I think the editor-in-chief, same thing. I mean sometimes I get emails about pre-submission inquiries. I will give you my opinion if you send it to me. If you don't, somebody else behind, you know, sort of a veil that you will never see will give you an opinion. Meaning they may just reject it or they may send it out to review, there are no guarantees. So it's faster if you send a pre-submission inquiry. If you really don't. And what would you be inquiring about? I mean I think, you know, you could be inquiring about fit, you know, for the journal. That could be one thing you're inquiring about. You know, you could be inquiring about, you know, significance perhaps. You know, is this a significant enough advance that we think. But in the end, the only thing that a pre-submission inquiry will do is either tell you it's appropriate or not. And if it's appropriate, you know, it may still be that you will get rejected. So, you know, if it goes out to review and it just doesn't fare well, that's, I don't know about you guys. I receive a lot less of them at JCEM than, you know, maybe editors at, you know, Cell or Science might receive. I think it's a more formal way for those journals. They have information about that, but every now and then we receive the pre-submission inquiry. I also receive ones for the type of the article, like, you know, we have this many samples. Would it fit as a research article or, you know, I mean, those kind of questions. If you have, you know, any questions like that, that's a good way of, you know, double checking with the journal. Is it a short brief report? You know, it is a, you know, that there might be a format that would fit your study. Yeah, I get them for length a lot with many, so many reviews in endocrinology are 3,000 to 5,000 words. We can go, we can fudge a little to 6,000, but I did have an author say, you know, I started this mini review and I added these authors and now it's 10,000 words. Will you still publish it? And I said, absolutely not. We will not, but could you divide it up into two that could appear back to back? And that way, all that work can be two instead of one, and they actually did that, shuffled around the author, the first author, and now I have two really nice mini reviews on related topics that can be cited. Thank you, Dan Frigo. Are all the society journals free for members or just endocrinology? I think just endocrinology. It's definitely true for endocrinology. Perhaps it was to get more submissions, and we don't have a page limit or a figure limit. You know, and our submissions remain pretty stable for the last three or four years. We're not better or worse, but we would like to, now that we're sort of over the five, five is kind of the magic number for impact factors, really. That's when you all of a sudden get a lot more submissions. As your impact factor approaches six, it gets up into that kind of next tier, sort of teetering. So smaller journals with lesser impact factors don't get as many submissions until you start getting on the map with your impact factor. So that's what we're always trying to do, and our submissions, I think, will increase dramatically once we get solidly up around a six. JCM, you guys are over six right now, 6.5. 7. Yeah, and you guys are where, three-ish, four-ish? Okay, because they're young. They're very young. Jess is quite young. So that's really great for a young journal to have that impact factor even there. Because you have journals like Steroids and other journals that have been around for a long, long, long time, and their impact factors don't really go up. And it can be because there's a lot of reasons. It can be because it's a very small field, and that doesn't mean those papers aren't really good. It's just that it's a small field. It's not going to get the citations that a hot topic in a large, large field is going to get. So there's things that go into the impact factor. So if you're studying women's reproductive endocrinology, there's not that many journals you can go to for your papers, and they aren't really high impact. Doesn't mean your work's not important. It doesn't mean that's not an important topic to study. So I'm not a big fan of following the impact factor at all, because I work in a small field, like progesterone. I can name on the entire planet less than five people who devote the amount of time on progesterone that I do. So it is a small field. And so that doesn't mean the work is less important, but it's never going to be in cell science or nature, rarely, right? Yeah. For JES, since we are an open access journal, we have article publishing charges, but if you are invited for a mini-review, then it's free for members, which is not the case for some other private journals, apparently. So Tim was very excited about this. It's like, do you know Frontiers invite people and they still charge them? I'm like, yeah. Yeah. So that's the, I mean, so if you have any ideas about mini-reviews, please reach out. We will invite you. It will be free of charges. Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, JCM, I think, still charges except for invited content. It's the only thing we don't charge for. So, you know, perspectives or commentaries, things that were invited, we don't charge for. But, but everything, yeah, they're not, yeah, they're not, they're not ridiculously high. And talk about predatory journals. Oh, my goodness gracious. Yeah. You probably receive, you know, emails from them a lot, right? I mean, if you publish once, then you're on somebody's list. And, you know, there were lists of predatory. You could find them. But, you know, some people, you know, some journals object to those lists. But, you know, they're pretty easy to try. They're the ones that come and tell you that, you know, hey, we need your, we need your submission. And, you know, what they're really looking for is somebody who's willing to pay. And, you know, there is a publication cost. But, you know, they make more money the more they publish. And so, you know, I think you do need to be very careful about predatory journals. We're not. No. How does one identify a predatory journal? And I think the red flags are, oh, you know, we need this paper, right? It happens to be right in your field. And then it'll, our impact factor is six or six and a half. And then, but then you'll see that their charges are like $6,000. Or it's open access. So they're really targeting assistant professors and, you know, young people who you don't need to pay $6,000 for open access journals. Like crazy. That's crazy. And like I've noticed there's a journal where my colleagues have said I reviewed the paper for that journal and I rejected it. And then I saw it published like two weeks later. Like two weeks later. And then that impact factor is 6.5. You know, but that's an artificially inflated impact factor. You know, and when people see that and they're savvy and they see your CV and they see all these papers on these predatory journals, they're not going to respect that. So you have to be careful. And there are published lists of them. You can, and that's why you should always ask your colleagues, you know, and your peers, you know, what do you think of this journal? Have you ever sent something into that journal? And that's, I did that with Kaylee Schwertfiger about this journal. And I don't want to get sued, so I'm not going to say the name of it. But she basically said that, yeah, they keep inviting me all the time and they have a pretty decent impact factor. And I'm like, you know, you just kind of talk to people and they've heard things or they've had a bad experience or they can kind of warn you. I didn't even know what that meant until I became an editor. And Maggie, one of our managing editors, told me about it. And there's a list. You can find it online. And to watch out for that because they charge really high rates and promise these high impact factors and a rapid turnaround, but they're not rigorously reviewed. So, you know, open access and sell is about $9,000. Yeah, so they're not predatory because they're not coming after you, but I'm sure if you could get a paper and sell or sell journals, you'd pay $9,000, but they are expensive. Yeah, so yeah, so the question is, what, how should you be responding to the reviewers? I think a couple of things, you know, we usually send to just two reviewers sometimes, occasionally we'll send to three reviewers. So if you're invited to resubmit, I think, you know, the key is you can't do every experiment or study that those reviewers want. Sometimes it's a little out of control. At the same time, you know, my recommendation is, you know, obviously you want to respond professionally. But if you have any doubts, you know, you should reach out to the editor. You know, a really good associate editor is going to say, to some extent, what is really most important. You know, if they say address all the comments, that doesn't help because it doesn't tell you what address means. Does that mean address it with an experiment or address it within the text? So I think when you get your reviews back, you should go through each of the comments. Don't skip anything and make sure that you have a plan for each one. So we're not going to do this experiment because of X, Y, or Z. We can do this, but not quite what the reviewer asks. So come up with that list. And if you feel pretty good with what you've done, that's great. But if there's any doubts, I mean, I would reach out to the editor and then just say, hey, you know, does this sound great? So, you know, so, you know, there's one journal that, you know, relatively high impact journal that we recently submitted to. The editor came to me and said, we really want to see this submission back. Why don't we get together in a Zoom call? And so I actually called her up. You know, she was based in Amsterdam. She made some time for me and we went through the reviews. And I said, this is what I'm going to do. And then she just kind of nodded her head on the other and said that that sounds perfect. We don't typically do that, but I would say that, you know, reaching out to the editor, if you have any questions or doubts, especially if one of the reviews is harsh, the fact that you've been invited to come back, I think means that you have a chance. I agree completely. I think the most people who reach out to me are asking for more time. So we have like an automated system that gives them, I think, three months, no matter what the revisions are. It's just like preset. And like they'll they'll email back and say, well, I'm doing these experiments, but I can't make the timeline. And then I always give them, you know, whatever time they need because I really want the submission. And I'm always like, thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to this, you know, as much time as you need. How about I set it to this date? I usually add a few weeks from what they said. Again, because I feel like I'm serving the membership. Other journals are more strict on that. And we do tell our reviewers if you are and if you if you're asking for so many experiments that they can't do that in three months, then probably should reject it. That's probably the borderline. And then because of covid, I've been extra generous with that time because like people are slower. Right. There's supply demand problems. There's personnel problems everywhere. So like I'm giving people a lot longer to get back to me on that. But I really want those papers. And I try to make that clear. Yeah, and I think it's very important. I mean, as long as you justify your response. Right. So, I mean, they ask a experiment with material. There is material shortage. Right. So, I mean, those are legit reasons to ask for extended time or not even do that experiment. But do something else. I mean, you don't need to just do that. Right. So I think what I would love to see is that every point is addressed and it doesn't always have to be confirmatory. In certain cases, it might be, you know, with all due respect, we think that right. So you can argue, but don't ignore the comments. Just please respond to it. Anybody? ChatGPT? Who use ChatGPT? Just one? Come on. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, well, I asked the question, I was like, how do you use it? Do you use it for papers, abstracts? I'm not a native English speaker, so I asked the ChatGPT to check my English sentence, and if there's like a grammar miss or something weird, they change it. So for non-English native speakers, the ChatGPT checks my English, I use it like that. What do you think? That's really a sophisticated spell check, right? On your computer, that's a great way to use ChatGPT. We, you know, it's still quite an evolving story with it, right? It's rapidly changing how we do things, and we have not gotten to a point where the, in our publications we're saying you cannot use it, but I think we're going to ask for a disclosure statement for if and how you used it. I think it could be a great tool for this reason. It can be a tool for doing, I mean, really, you know, reference managers are AI in a way, so this is just much more sophisticated, and I think we'll develop ways to use it as a tool. We're stressing it should be your original writing and not ChatGPT's writing. You know, it still makes a lot of mistakes, so, you know, at least, I think there'll be a time when it doesn't make as many mistakes, right? But we'd like to see that you are the author of the work, and maybe the ChatGPT is helping you check it or helping you, you know, we had some other examples helping you summarize something you wrote, or it's giving you a template that you're modifying, something like that. It's still a scary landscape. Yeah, so the question is does, if you put text into chat GPT, does it save it? I think the answer is yes, and I think the answer is you don't know what's going to happen to it. So you've basically given away, you know, your own creativity to some extent. So beware. What you put in there, you know, is really, can be used in any way. And they even tell you that, you know, when you use it. That whatever you type in, you know, can be reused or usable in other ways. But they'll see it. They'll see it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly correct. Yeah, yeah, that actually could, that's a good point. It could violate some patent laws, you know, or your patentability about, you know. I think we're still navigating these waters. I don't know that we have an answer right now. So I have friends that are software engineers that are very close friends. And they have said it is excellent at writing code. So they'll use it to write code. And they say that you can take a database. One of our scientists, Scott Dame here, he was on the steering committee of the Androgen Society. He works on androgen receptor. He said that it's a really nice way to take big data, like zip Z files, I guess, and you can tell it what you want to do. You can't just tell it what figure you want. But he said it'll replace a bioinformaticist person totally, like sort of the rudimentary transformations you have to do with your big data. It'll do that in seconds. And so he goes, you can go really fast to get from raw data in a big data file to something that you can then analyze really fast. And so he's using it to do that. And I just don't know how to do that. I don't know that field. Probably using the wrong language. But he said he saved a ton of time analyzing his RNA-seq and ChIP-seq and cut and run data and getting it to a digestible format on his computer very quickly without needing the bioinformatics core faculty, which is a huge leap, right? That's a huge leap. I'm just going to say we have about 25 minutes. But while we're still having questions, I'm going to pass around evaluations. If you can please give us your feedback on the session so we can improve this and the rest of the series for next year. I'll do that now while we have more questions. And I apologize for the people who came in late. We decided to come down here because we had such a small group. And then people wandered in. And also, the lights were a bit of an issue, just kind of staring in our eye. I couldn't see a thing. So sorry, that's kind of my fault that we moved down here. How can I get a chance to be an editor or associate editor of the Endocrine Society journals? I think that there are a couple of things. I think that when people ask you to review, make sure you have time before you say yes. And then if you are invited to review and you choose to say yes, I think you develop a name for yourself when you're on time and submit an objective, well-written review. And then eventually, you get asked to be on a board. And then you might get asked to be an associate editor. So I think participation in the society. There's also a page on the website that talks about the different committees. And you can express your interest in being in governance of the society. In particular, one of my first committees I was ever on was the Publications Core Committee. And I was nominated to that committee by the editor at the time, John Nielsen, of Molendo because I had reviewed for him. He had sent me a lot of reviews. And I was on time. And I would submit my reviews. And then he got to know who I was. And then he said, oh, she'd be good on this committee. So it's really kind of, within a large society, it's kind of like grassroots that way. And then you can also try to network with editors and tell them you're interested. I get people sending me their resumes or CVs all the time and saying, I really want to be a reviewer. I'd really like to be on the board. And I'll look at that because I'm trying to get a diverse board that represents all of the countries, all of the ranks, all of the ages, all of the gender associations. I'm trying to get a very diverse collection of 50 board members. I'm trying to represent every country that has members. So I like to get those. And usually, we send them around. It's not just my decision. And all of my nominations have to be vetted by the Publications Core Committee. So again, I can't just be a cowboy and do whatever I want. But I like people who want to participate. I like enthusiasm because I want people who are going to be responsive when I ask them to do something. Yeah, I mean, whenever you contribute to the journal as a reviewer, it's kept in an Excel sheet somewhere. So we have all these files. And when it is time to select an editorial board member, we go back and check who did the most reviews, how long it take, and you know. So that data is kept. When I applied to be an editor-in-chief, they looked at that. And I was, OK, you know. So that data is kept somewhere, definitely participation. And also publishing. Did you publish in a wide? I mean, what's your experience as an author, right? So that is also, I think, important. If you just published a few papers, how are you going to claim that you have the experience to contribute to the journal in a meaningful way? I think all of everything that they just said is true. And then also, we rate every reviewer. So each reviewer has a rating. So that means good, concise reviews that are insightful, that are not overly critical and heavy, not recognizing what makes a good paper. So we rate every review from every reviewer. And then so our database has, how many times did you accept? How many times did you review? How many times did you submit on time? How good were your reviews? All of that data is there. And that's actually how I go and find reviewers for papers, is that I look at those metrics because then I know that that's somebody who is likely to give a good review. I think I might have gotten that at one time. Yeah. Other questions? Yes. broadly accessible. You know, we don't, we don't have that, interestingly. Some journals do, you know, they'll have like, you know, short, you know, impact statements, or things that could be, you know, catchy. Our journal does not, you know, we don't have like short running titles or, or anything like that. I don't know about you guys. We don't have it either. But I love those statements. Actually, it's a very good skill to have. So if you can do it for your abstract, right, that's great. It's a great use of AI. Because apparently, you can take your, you can take your abstract, and you can ask the AI to pitch it to high school, college, whatever, nurses, whatever. And, you know, donors, like, you can ask it to do that. I haven't done that. But my friend said they have. I'm like, Oh, my gosh. And they're like, you have to edit it because it will be wrong. But at least it gives you like something that'll save you time, it gives you the first template, and then you're gonna have to go through that and make sure it's not saying something ridiculous, which apparently it does do, but I haven't spent much time on it. My postdoc said that she used it to write her innovation statement for her fellowship. And then she fed it the grant she wrote, and it came back with an abstract, she has to write a 30 line abstract. And then she said it was there were goofy sentences in there that she had to fix, but it saved her several hours to do that. I was like, Okay, wow. So just be careful. You know, I, I've always said that, you know, a publishable unit, it shouldn't be the minimal publisher. I don't, I mean, a minimal publishable unit is a publishable unit, so the reality, I think, is if, if you have a good story, you can come up with a really good title and a really good conclusion to that story, you know, I, every journal is going to weigh different aspects of your study differently, whether it's a lot of mechanism versus maybe clinical impact and, or something in between. That's part of the reason why it's important to target the right journal, number one, but I think that, you know, that's also another reason to, you know, not aim for super, super high journals because, you know, the expectation is higher and higher, but it's not the number of experiments that you do, it's really sort of how good they are and how does it tell the story that you're trying to make and, and, and how good your controls are. Yeah, I think for Jess, it might be the, you know, least publishable unit is probably a brief report, one figure, you know, you have a very exciting observation from a sequencing experiment, novel, you know, very exciting, but you don't have a mechanism, right, so you can make it into a brief So you can make it into a brief report, but I really like to see a story, right, so you start with an observation and then you get into that. You don't have to have, you know, very many different panels or additional data as long as what you have supports, you know, your hypothesis that was generated, but that story is nice, you know, that you can follow throughout the paper. Yeah, I think that's all, those are all great comments. I would say too, don't wait till you're all done and have all your data to think about writing. Wait till you got, maybe you've got 80% of your data and you know you need this one experiment or these two experiments to kind of put an ending on the story and you sort of have a little bit of a prediction of what's going to happen. You've got all your controls and you still need to do that and repeat it or you need to repeat two or three of your experiments several times, but so then start writing when you got like 80%. Yeah, it's going to reveal to you what you need, right, because you're going to try to make your story and you're going to see a great big hole that you didn't see before and you're like, oh, I need that and then really avoid, I always tell my people, avoid a chronological story. You're not going to present your data in the order you did it. That's the natural tendency, but really you're going to put each figure in front of you and move it around until it tells the best story. So, there's so many times we'll have a big table and we'll just move all this stuff around and not for the chronology of when you actually did it, but for what tells the best story and that's when you come up with a hole and go, oh, I see, I better do this one experiment. So, you want to have, you want to start forming the order, the outline and the order. The first thing is the order of the figures and what they say. It's never the order that you did them in, almost never. So, that's going to reveal what you need. Oh yeah, it came to me now. Maybe that 80% stage is the best time to go and present it, you know, present it to somebody who's not from your lab, present it to, you know, another colleague. And if you can tell them that story, probably, you know, you will do those final couple of experiments and be able to publish. If you cannot present it in a nice way, in a, you know, way that flows, probably you need to do a little bit more. And also they will ask questions that might indicate, you know, holes in the story that you didn't consider. So yeah, come present it. Endo, submit your abstracts, you know. I think that's a good time, that 80%. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you're not there yet. You know you need to repeat something and you might need to do this one more analysis. You might need to do this one control. But you can kind of, you kind of have everything you need. You just need to flesh it out. That's when you need to start writing the paper. Anything else, you guys? What time do we get out of here? Officially 2.30? So we have like 15 minutes. If anyone has anything not addressed on the slide or anything new, I will say I've really enjoyed being an editor for the Endocrine Society. I love the networking. I love supporting young faculty and trainees and helping them get their work published. I like that it's really fair and objective and that it's a teamwork. It's a team effort and we're super well supported by our staff. It's really been fun. I like that they turn over the editors. The editor term is three years. Because of COVID and I think the difficulty in finding a new editor, they did ask me to renew my term so now I'll be doing it for six years. But I'm pretty sure they'll be booting me out the door after that, you know, because it's good to have the fresh face of the editor. I think that's really nice. Yeah and also, I mean everything changes so quickly every day. I mean three months ago, CHET GPT was not an issue and all of a sudden it's an issue now. So I think that fresh blood, it's so important to have that new perspective, new way of thinking issues related to publishing. Thank you very much for coming today and being part of the group.

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