Greater London, England, United Kingdom
I edit and write pan-European research, innovation and higher education policy news and features.
• Responsible for the content of the journals, including commissioning articles to run alongside non-commissioned research, making the final decision on every article, guiding the make-up of each article following peer review, and ensuring that the content in any given month works cohesively. • Edit accepted articles for content, style, length, and grammar, taking them from submission through to publication. Proof-read articles prior to publication and sign off all content. • Work with the Consultant Editors and Editorial Boards to make decisions on the overall aims, scope, and direction of the journals. • Attend national and international conferences and IJPN’s annual awards ceremony as the ‘face’ of the journals, engaging with practitioners, researchers and advocacy groups from around the world. • Commission and edit sponsored supplements. • Work with the journals’ sales and marketing teams to ensure that the content is appropriate to their strategies so that they can meet their targets. • Responsible for the day-to-day running of the journals, including coordinating the peer review of submitted articles, liaising with authors and fielding press and PR enquiries. • Manage the editorial budgets. • Established and now write IJPN’s monthly e-newsletter and manage its Twitter feed. • Lay out articles in Adobe InDesign and draw simple figures with Adobe Illustrator.
• Constructed, checked and sent out the weekly email alerts for Nature News (to over 250,000 recipients) and for several other journals and gateways. • Modified and updated HTML-based web pages on demand. • Was involved in the planning, construction and launching of several new products, most notably Nature Middle East. • Updated the top story on the nature.com homepage daily, which demanded an ability to judge the importance of scientific news stories and their appropriateness for the site. • Used in-house CMS to push content live and deliver information to internal and external databases. • Dealt with podcasts and videos and performed basic image manipulation.
In addition to all of the duties as Copy Editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience (below): • Recruited 6 new Copy Editors to the Nature Reviews department — by vetting applicants’ CVs, creating tests of copy editing skill and assessing applicants’ submissions, co-conducting interviews, and advising on the final decision. • Was responsible for training 5 of these 6 Copy Editors, most of which had no previous experience, until they could work completely independently. • Attended monthly departmental meetings with high-level publishing and production staff to discuss matters of department-wide significance as a representative of the Copy Editors. • Made decisions on house style issues as they arose and updated the style guide accordingly. • Organized regular Copy Editor team meetings to feed back relevant departmental changes and discuss best working practices.
• Edited and proof-read accepted manuscripts and in-house content for clarity, scientific accuracy, style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and internal consistency of figures, tables, and text. • Communicated with authors to agree corrections to their articles pre-publication. • Wrote numerous “Research Highlights” and “In the News” articles, which were published in the journal both in print and online. • Assisted in monitoring copy flow on the journal to ensure that weekly and monthly deadlines were met.