Two Cardiff University Professors play key role in New American Top Science Journal
The American Physiological Society (APS), by far the world’s largest society of physiologists and pathophysiologists, with more than 10,000 members, will be launching its new flagship journal FUNCTION later this year.
Remarkably, two Cardiff University Professors, Val O’Donnell (School of Medicine, Co-Director of the Systems Immunity Research Institute) and Ole Petersen CBE MAE FRS (School of Biosciences, Director of the Academia Europaea – Cardiff University Knowledge Hub) play key roles in the development of this new journal. Val O’Donnell is one of the 10 members of the inaugural Executive Editorial group and Ole Petersen is the Editor-in-Chief.
Last week, Ole Petersen, the Executive Editors, the President and the Executive Director of APS met at Duke University’s world leading Molecular Physiology Institute in Durham, North Carolina to speak at a very well attended international symposium on ‘Bringing Great Physiology to the Forefront of Science’. This was followed by FUNCTION’s inaugural editorial group meeting, deciding on the most important aspects of the new, fully Plan S compliant, Open Access journal.
Several fresh and innovative ideas were agreed that should make it particularly attractive for authors to submit excellent papers to FUNCTION. These include:
- a novel type of short Focus Article, reporting a very important new observation, based on solid evidence, but without the need to explore all the ramifications that would be expected for a full paper.
- a new style Evidence Review, citing only original papers and not other reviews.
- the decision to publish Perspective Articles for each original full paper.
- Importantly full original papers would also be linked to invited presentations at a forthcoming APS conference.
- Furthermore it was decided that a firm decision about acceptance/rejection for a submitted article would be made at the end of the first review round so that, irrespective of the outcome of further experiments required by reviewers or editors, a decision to accept would stand.
Ole Petersen said,
“The meeting at the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute was a great success with some fantastic talks by the extraordinarily strong inaugural Editorial Team, which includes four Fellows of The Royal Society, three members of Academia Europaea and three members of the US National Academy of Sciences. I was also delighted to be able to announce at the meeting that three Nobel Laureates, Erwin Neher FRS (Max Planck Society, Germany), Sir Peter Ratcliffe FRS (University of Oxford and the Crick Institute, London) and Thomas Südhof FRS (Stanford University), have joined FUNCTION as Consulting Editors.”