I was wandering about the exhibitor booths, absorbing the atmosphere of a closing market. Instruments being powered down. Tarps being thrown about. In the process, I bumped into this jovial fellow at the AIP publishing booth. Since the staff have nothing to do we had a chat about life. This article below collates our conversation with my previous chats with other editors in the past.

Editors are a common sight at the Annual Meeting. It offers them a chance to network with scientists, headhunt presenters for invited reviews, catch up on the latest science, and gossip with the publishing industry. They are happy to talk to both group leaders, post-docs, as well as graduate students. Given that a lab head's schedule might be full even before day 1, the rest of us are collectively valuable partners in a win-win arrangement. We turn our literature search into an organised short review, and beef up our credentials. They gain citable proof of the scientific community's continual support. And money, of course.

It is these conversations that may lead to special issues, and the very first issue of a new journal is special indeed. That's why Luigi Longobardi is here gathering contributors for the first Biophysics Reviews issue to come out end of 2020. It's part of his job as executive editor, and he says he's had several leads already by Monday afternoon.

Additionally, us grads and post-docs form the main recruitment pool of future editors: Enough experience to be familiar with the peer-review process, hopefully from both sides. Not so much that we become fossilised in our habits of scientific writing, reasoning, etc.

That flexibility we still possess is a critical skill of editors. Editors read a lot, and have to deal with the whole process of selecting raw manuscripts, and refining them into publications. Their biggest challenge here is to spot a gem of valuable science in an otherwise poorly-written submission, and avoid sending them elsewhere, to a competing journal, or worse. The fact that some publishers offer in-house english editing services is precisely to cater for non-native speakers and tragic monolinguals.

The efficiency we attain while dealing with the torrent of fresh research is another critical skill. The split decision making we make at the Annual Meeting, juggling between sessions and plotting routes through posters, is the same used by editors. Luigi Longobardi gives two hours as a guideline to conduct relevant literature searches, with the goal of attaining just enough knowledge in a field he's not sufficiently familiar with. This figure is comparable to those I obtained from other editors in the past: even a generous Nature editor might only have seven hours in total before they share their assessment with the board.

So why be an editor? Turns out Luigi wanted to be one since the start of his Ph.D. He once saw a job advert for a physics journal, citing a Ph.D. and a post doc as their requirements. Luigi therefore followed through with the positions, applied directly to said journal afterwards, and hopped right off the research ship. The process seems surprisingly easy to me, a recovering sufferer of choice paralysis.

Now that Liugi is higher up on the ladder, he gets to decide how to run the editorial team - and the man does like to have things his way. Just like entering every other large institution, be it industry, administration, or even university teaching, the biggest shock for transitioning researchers tends to be that everyone needs to be on the same page. Otherwise the journal stops making consistent decisions, authors can't form expectations, and everyone's unhappy.

It's not a big ask. The induction process with Luigi's team involves a two/three-day training session, some months shadowing a more senior editor, and you're good to go. Fairly standard for any company.

Ultimately, Luigi is here at the Annual Meeting to launch the Biophysics Reviews and complete a triangle of Chemistry+Physics and Engineering+Physics. It's naturally tempting to ask why I would submit to something that has no impact factor. Admittedly, I have written a review with the Biophysical Reviews due to being headhunted by an editor halfway around the globe two years back. The Biophysicist board is deciding whether to extend the fee waiving process, and one of its editors Gundula Bosch assures me they would be flexible in topics if I submit a report on my high-school VR teaching project.

What can the Biophysics Review offer me? Luigi's pitch is this: it is your chance to join the history books, launching a journal so that iin thirty years time people can trace your Nobel laureate trajectory all the way back here, when you helped kickstart his gig. Most of our esteemed journals started this way, and the critical difference between a failed startup and a community standard is the support of the research community. I recommend curious readers to browse the first issue of the Biophysical Journal: https://www.cell.com/biophysj/issue?pii=S0006-3495(60)X7588-5 , then head forward.

History is contained in those pages.

Even so, it's still not an easy sell in a world full of journals. You can find Luigi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LuigiLon  for his short takes.