Last week, the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors held its annual meeting in Denver. The event marked a 10-year anniversary for ISMTE, and organizers rose to the occasion, packing the schedule full of thoughtful, engaging presentations on topics that were relevant at both the industry and the individual publisher levels.
This year’s keynote speaker was Trevor Butterworth, executive director of Sense About Science USA, an organization dedicated to fostering trust among the scientific community, the media, and the public by improving the ways in which scientific research is communicated. In his talk, he drew attention to shortcomings of the scientific community in terms of the verification and dissemination of results and the lack of formal training journalists receive in understanding statistics, an essential part of being able to talk about scientific inquiry and findings. Through efforts like instructional workshops for reporters and guidance for researchers who are giving interviews about their work, newsworthy scientific discoveries and the publishers who print them can find a wider, less skeptical audience.
In addition to addressing how science is talked about, speakers at this year’s conference tackled many of the hot topics currently defining the direction of the publishing industry. Mike Hepp, a presenter from Sheridan Journal Services, proposed that the days of working on manuscripts and reviews offline using traditional software may be coming to an end as more submission sites begin to offer integration with online authoring tools like Authorea and Overleaf. In another presentation, the editor-in-chief of PLOS One explored open access publications, how the concept of open access has evolved since its inception (when there was concern about its long-term impact on scholarly publishing), and what we can expect from open access in the future. Finally, with the rising popularity of preprint servers and the pressure researchers face to get their work into the hands of readers more quickly than the publication process might allow, experts from Crossref and Preprint.org shared some of the ethical considerations that go along with preprint papers, including how they can affect citations, their relationship to the published version of the work, and how poor science in preprints might be handled.
A wide variety of breakout sessions at this year’s meeting provided attendees the opportunity to seek out the topics that interested them, many of which introduced tools, techniques, and principles that could be taken home and applied in the office to increase efficiency. With subjects ranging from copyediting tips and features in Microsoft Excel to updates from the major submission system vendors and guidance on how to perform an audit of your peer review process, there was truly something for everyone. Being afforded the opportunity to interact with and learn from others who do the same job that you do in sometimes very different ways has always been one of the most rewarding aspects of ISMTE’s meetings, and this year was no exception. And being in an environment in which the spontaneous conversations you have with your peers are every bit as informative as the items on the agenda is almost as refreshing as Denver’s mountain air.
