Additional EMBL resources
Interview-based career profiles for this career area
Anne Nielsen, Senior Editor, EMBO Press
A life science careers blog for early career researchers
This blog aims to inspire early career researchers exploring different career options. We provide interview-based profiles of life scientists working in diverse science-related careers and articles on a broad range of career-related topics, with new content added on a regular basis.
Publishing professionals are employed in a range of roles by society journals and commercial publishers. This includes professional editors for scientific journals and commissioning editors for science magazines or book publishers. The most common career destination for PhD-holders in publishing is a professional scientific editor at a journal, and we focus on this role here.
The tasks associated with a professional scientific editor role may include a subset of the following activities:
Editors need a broad scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills to read and assess the scope of articles from a range of fields. They have to make logical decisions based on expert reviews and clearly articulate the basis of the decision to authors. A core of the job involves engaging with authors, reviewers, and the scientific community using a variety of communication channels (e.g. email, in-person meetings, phone calls, social media platforms, and scientific events). The ability to reach out and build a strong network is therefore a key aspect of the role.
In our careers and skills survey, 5 science publishing professionals told us the competencies they use most in their daily work The most frequently selected competencies were:
Language skills
For companies / societies publishing english-language journals, no additional languages are required. Scientific editors are generally not involved in copy editing, so while excellent communication skills are very important, you do not need to have perfect English grammar.
It is possible to enter scientific publishing directly from the bench. Applicants with at least one postdoc may be preferred over applicants directly from the PhD, but this depends on the publisher. The job title for the first position varies: depending on the publisher this can be ‘assistant editor’, ‘associate editor’, ‘scientific editor’ or another title. To understand which title is used by a specific publisher, you can look for their editors on LinkedIn and see what position they had when they joined the journal from academia, or look for the newest editors on their website (most journals have an ‘about the editors’ page with a biosketch for each of their editors).
Many scientific publishers offer possibilities for career progression, i.e. moving to more senior roles (editor, senior editor, chief/executive editor) at the same/another journal, or moving into other management positions within publishing. After gaining experience in the role, some editors also later change career direction – for example, moving into grant or science management roles, or becoming consultants in scientific writing.
In our careers and skills survey, 5 publishing professionals told us what they appreciate most about their work. The most common selections were, that the work:
Interview-based career profiles for this career area
Anne Nielsen, Senior Editor, EMBO Press
For EMBL fellows
Within EMBL, further internal resources (e.g. recorded career seminars) can also be found on our career exploration intranet pages.
For all career areas, we highly recommend first learning more about the careers using the resources above, then conducting informational interviews to gain further insights directly from former PhDs working in career areas that interest you.
Last update: November 2023