METM11 panel     Thread: Knowledge updates

News with practical implications from the world of biomedical editors

Mary Ellen Kerans, coordinator -” Barcelona, Spain

News about what editors of biomedical science journals are thinking and doing reaches us in the form of reports from their conferences -” notably the periodic peer review conference organized by the JAMA & Archives and the BMJ publishing groups -” and from the websites, organs and listservs of associations where editorial board members congregate (e.g., EASE, CSE, COPE and WAME).

This panel will start with very brief presentations outlining the news that manuscript editors and translators need to know about, including the preparation of manuscripts with supplementary material for posting, recent developments in editorial attitudes and practices toward plagiarism, and issues related to defining authorship. The presenters are themselves manuscript or authors' editors who have attended meetings of journal editors, who watch for trends on association listservs, or who have witnessed changes in how manuscripts are now written and treated. We will leave time for audience discussion and questions about these and related topics. With this panel we hope to start responding to feedback received after METM10, in which participants called for more information from the publishing and editorial community itself.

 

Mary Ellen Kerans, coordinator, came to the profession of biomedical authors' editing and translation gradually, as part of a career in English language teaching that emphasized academic reading and writing. She is a member of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). Write to if you already have a question you'd like to pose.

Marta Pulido, MD, PhD, trained as a medical editor at the Section of Publications, Mayo Clinic, Rochester (MN, USA). Qualified in Editing and Writing by the American Medical Writers Association, she works as a freelance author's editor in Barcelona and as Consulting Editor of Institut of Investigació Médica (IMIM-Parc de Salut Mar), Barcelona, Spain. She is a regular attender of the four-yearly biomedical peer review congress organized by the JAMA and BMJ publishing groups.

Marije de Jager is a freelance editor and translator living in Rovereto, Italy. She has been working in medical editing and translating for more than 20 years and currently copyedits several English-language medical journals published in Italy. In recent years she has been engaged in research into plagiarism (specifically in science writing) and finding ways to help authors avoid it.

Dado ÄŒakalo is editorial assistant and copy editor of Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology in Zagreb, Croatia, a freelance translator and a manuscript editor. Since 2009, he has been using Ithenticate's tool as part of the CrossCheck initiative to detect scholarly plagiarism. He finds the tool useful but warns against uncritical interpretation of findings.

Catherine Mark, originally a laboratory scientist, has worked for the last 15 years as an editor for biomedical/biotechnology researchers at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología/CSIC (National Center for Biotechnology/Spanish National Research Council) in Madrid, Spain.