Geophysicist Marcia McNutt to be New Editor in Chief of Science. (April 4, 2013)

Marcia McNutt, who resigned as head of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in February, has been recruited by Science to become its editor-in-chief beginning June 1. She will take over from Bruce Alberts who announced his retirement last year.

From 2000 to 2009 Dr. McNutt served on the journal's Senior Editorial Board, the group that assists in setting Science's policy, and she told ScienceInsider: "It gave me a chance to know many of the editors and staff at Science, and to understand at a high level a lot of the decisions that the editor-in-chief is responsible for," including the balance of content between news and research or between different disciplines. "We anguished at many meetings over the readability of articles, over things like how much should be in the supplemental material, over trying to promote papers from developing countries. I'm sure a lot of those decisions and issues have not gone away."

In defining what she sees as the current roll of scientific journals she says: "I believe there is a huge value-added that journals still provide. I can say this as an author—[there's] the value-added that peer reviewers have offered me, by helping to focus papers, finding places where I could have said things better, or had made errors." But Dr McNutt also says: "journals [must] become more than just a place where papers are parked, but rather become part of the rapid advancement of science."