Early-Career Editors joining MBoC board

Introducing the 2021 MBoC Early-Career Editors

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is proud to announce the selection of 24 Early-Career Editors to join the board of Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC). This new group of pre-tenure faculty and postdocs will be responsible for highlighting preprints posted on bioRxiv. Their contributions will alert MBoC readers to the latest research, provide readily digestible summaries for preprint readers, and add visibility for authors.

Row 1, L-R: Kristina Aguilera, Michael Burton, Jacob Herman. Row 2: Alexandre Bisson, Gautam Dey, Grace Lim. Row 3: Luis Bonet-Ponce, Jacqueline De Lora, Keren Lasker. Row 4: Fadie Coleman, Seham Ebrahim, Rashmi Priya. Row 5: Samuel Dean, Omaya Dudin, Jennifer Landino. Row 6: Dasfne Lee-Liu, Adriana Mantegazza, Daniel Rios. Row 7: Assaf Zaritsky, Daisuke Takao, Huaiying Zhang. Row 8: Lindsey Seldin, Sabrya Carim, Viji Subramanian.

MBoC’s Early-Career Editors will apply Significance Statements and Badges to summarize and convey important aspects of selected preprints, which will be published in MBoC and displayed with the preprint on bioRxiv. Supported by a Learned Society Curation Award from the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ASCB is developing these curation tools for preprints and for MBoC articles. Significance statements will highlight key findings and advances, and badges will highlight specific aspects of the work such as advancing a new concept or methodology, providing open datasets, or having instructional value.

This new group of editors is a valuable addition to MBoC and ASCB’s community. Early-Career Editors will also receive training and mentorship from senior MBoC editors to support their growth as they continue to rise as future leaders in their research communities. The Early-Career Editors will serve in this volunteer role for one to two years, and we will have a recurring application cycle to recruit additional members each year. As this is the initial pilot phase of an evolving project, we look forward to the future of this group and their activities.

The new editors are listed below. See their full profiles here.

A note on the selection process

Following an open call for applications in December 2020 through January 2021, a selection committee composed of MBoC editors and ASCB staff reviewed nearly 200 applications to select these final candidates based on their scientific achievements, interest and experience with editorial and review activities, and their contributions to diversity and broader impacts of the scientific community. The applicant pool was well-balanced between postdocs and faculty (~50% each), genders, and was diverse with regard to race/ethnicity and geographical location (40% outside the United States). With this balance in mind, and with ASCB’s mission to increase diversity in the scientific community, we are pleased that the selected group features broad representation from the United States and around the world, across topics of interest to MBoC and ASCB communities.

We did not ask candidates to self-identify their race/ethnicity and gender, though these identities were often discussed in their interest statements or were apparent from their submitted reference letters or CVs and public profiles. Assembling a diverse group was a priority, but we realized after opening applications that we should have asked for such demographic data – as these statistics would be valuable to track over time as ASCB aims to increase the diversity of MBoC’s board and to support the recognition of scientists from historically excluded groups in the scientific community. In future applications, we will follow recommendations from ASCB’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan, which was being prepared around the time that we issued this call for applications.

Because of the size and strength of the applicant pool and our need to select an initial board of a manageable size, the final selection was very difficult and in the end there were still many strong candidates we did not select. There is clearly a deep desire from many early-career scientists to be involved with the publication process, and we hope that opportunities for early-career researchers will expand to fill this need.