The New Editor-in-Chief of Science Makes a Statement. (June 7, 2013)

In her first week on the job as Science's Editor-in-Chief, Marcia McNutt, has set out her main goals. Here we reprint the thrust of her first editorial.

Without backing off on any of the priorities of my predecessor [Bruce Alberts], my own top goal is to make Science the premier communications platform for accelerating advances in science, using the latest in modern technologies. Many excellent journals are geared toward disciplinary audiences. My view is that a journal such as Science that is read by researchers across a broad spectrum of fields has a special responsibility to publish papers that need to be communicated to scientists in fields outside of a narrow specialty, because new observations, technologies, processes, models, and results have the potential to revolutionize other areas of research. I would like to see Science publish even more of the best papers, that those papers are written so that their significance is broadly understood, and that computational methods, such as machine learning and natural language processes, can be harnessed to connect members of AAAS (the publisher of Science) to studies of interest.

The recently released report ARISE 2* (Advancing Research in Science and Engineering) from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes recommendations for breaking down barriers to collaboration across sectors to promote fundamental advances in science and their translation into new products and services. Their number-one recommendation is that a "knowledge network" be developed that "enables investigators from different disciplines to identify opportunities, establish collaborative efforts, and focus disparate expertise and approaches on problems of common interest." My hope is that Science can contribute to that knowledge network by promoting communication styles, technologies, and approaches that transcend individual disciplines. Clearly, Science cannot achieve recommendation number one alone, but I believe it is in a great position to be an important part of the solution.

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* ARISE 2: Unleashing America's Research & Innovation Enterprise (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, 2013), p. xiii; www.amacad.org/arise2.pdf.