Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting 2016: Enago’s Report in ESE

Denver, USA: Enago recently published a report of the Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting that was held this year in May 2016. The report for the conference was authored by Enago’s Sheryl Vaz, who was one of the recipients of the CSE Scholarship in 2016. The report was recently published in the November edition of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) quarterly, peer-reviewed journal European Science Editing (ESE). All members of ESE can refer to the report on the newly revamped website of ESE.

ESE includes published articles which cover all the aspects of scientific editing and publishing and also comprises of research articles, meeting reports, event highlights, website and book reviews, essays and viewpoints along with several resources and publications that are relevant to science editors.

This year’s conference was held at the Grand Hyatt in Denver, Colorado, with the theme for this year being “Pioneers in Scholarly Publishing: Thriving in the New Frontier”. According to Sheryl, this theme appropriately described the increased usage of different technologies that are leading to rapid changes for researchers and publishers who must familiarize themselves with these technologies in order to stay updated in this industry. Along with Sheryl, at this year’s event, we had Anupama Kapadia, Assistant General Manager, Editorial Operations, Enago, participating in the conference. According to Anupama, the CSE conference continues to thrive as a learning platform for professionals with useful insights about the publishing industry that are shared with the community.

The year’s conference had the highest attendance of more than 460 attendees from the publishing industry. Similar to each year’s conference, the first two days consisted of short courses on publication management and ethics that were organized for journal editors and manuscript editors.

The highlight of the conference was the keynote address by Deborah Blum (Co-editor, A Field Guide for Science Writers; Director, Knight Science Journalism Program, MIT), which focussed on communicating science to the average citizen who felt alienated by research establishments and also emphasized that researchers need to effectively communicate their research findings so that the average citizen is able to understand its key results and conclusions. Another noteworthy session at the conference was on ”Insights and Strategies for Career Development” by Lauren Fischer (The JAMA Network), Tom Lang (Tom Lang Communications and Training International) and Rajashree Ranganathan (American Society of Civil Engineers), which discussed the traditional and non-traditional methods of career development and also shared some fascinating approaches to developing a career in the publication industry.

Regarding her experience of attending the conference and publishing the report, Sheryl mentioned that “At this year’s meeting, I had a memorable conversation with CSE Membership Committee Chair, Lindsey Buscher, who said that it is young professionals who make all the difference and that we should be actively involved in organizations like CSE. From my experience, I look forward to contributing more actively to the industry and guiding early-career professionals to increase their awareness of academic publishing.”