4 February 2021 – Bernd Pulverer takes up the post with immediate effect. This became possible upon appointment of Facundo Batista as Chief Editor of The EMBO Journal, a position Pulverer held for a decade.
“We will further sharpen the unique profile EMBO Reports has among the EMBO Press portfolio to ensure the journal optimally serves the scientific community”, says Pulverer. “This includes developing the scope, editorial criteria and format of the journal to address its global readership and to engage better with early career researchers. We will hone selection criteria to efficiently share the research that is most valuable to the broader scientific community – such as welcoming orthogonal approaches to important research claims, resources and methods.”
Papers published in EMBO Reports present research results ranging from structural biology and biophysics to cell and developmental biology, with a broadening scope including host-pathogen interaction, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, environmental science and ecology. The journal publishes all formats of research papers. It particularly welcomes more self-contained studies which show a high level of technical quality and conceptual advance, but not necessarily an exhaustive analysis of molecular mechanistic detail.
“We will broaden the journal’s well-established ‘Science and Society’ section, which provides comment and analysis for the wider academic community and the public. It is a priority for us that high quality science can be published with one set of referee reports; enhancing our manuscript transfer network and engagement with Review Commons ensures this – for example, we consider manuscripts with referees reports from any other quality journal at EMBO Reports,” Bernd Pulverer adds.
EMBO Reports adheres to the pioneering Transparent Peer Review policy to ensure constructive and effective peer review: the journal publishes referee comments, author responses and editorial decision letters in full alongside the paper. The new ‘Refereed Preprint’ concept encourages authors to associate journal referee reports with their preprints. EMBO Reports encourages the deposition of minimally processed source data and provides a free service to curate and annotate figures, which enables direct search for data and experiments via the EMBO SourceData platform, making the papers and their data better findable.
EMBO Reports offers efficient manuscript transfers from and to the other EMBO Press journals, including Life Science Alliance, co-published with Rockefeller University Press and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and to partner journals such as eLife. It also welcomes manuscripts reviewed via Review Commons, a platform for journal-independent peer review, initiated by ASAPbio and EMBO.
EMBO Reports currently publishes about half of its papers fully Open Access; the other half is freely accessible from six months after publication. Journal income is used to cross-finance EMBO Press Open Access journals and parts of the EMBO Programmes fostering life scientists at different career stages.
