Schedule of Events | Symposia

Symposium Session 2 - New directions in scientific communication in cognitive neuroscience

Symposium Session 2: Sunday, March 30, 2025, 1:30 – 3:30 pm EDT, Independence Ballroom

Chairs: William Matchin¹, Brad Postle²; ¹University of South Carolina, ²University of Wisconsin-Madison
Presenters: Anastasia Yendiki, Michael Frank, Jacqueline Fulvio, Brad Postle, William Matchin

Communication is essential to science – our results and theories are only as useful as they can be conveyed to others. However, there are many challenges to effective science communication. Social media platforms have enabled more rapid and interconnected scientific discussion, but such informal yet highly visible interactions can be disrespectful or off-putting to many members of the community, with potentially problematic dynamics based on gender, ethnicity, and career status. There are major imbalances in citation and participation by these same dimensions, which can have big impacts on those seeking jobs and promotion which depend on scientific works being received by the community. Publication paywalls limit access to the public, but even scientists whose institutions do not have large budgets, which may be common around the world; frankly, even within major research institutions in Europe and the United States it can be difficult to access publications within our own fields. Finally, new open science practices have their limitations in dealing with scientific fraud, reproducibility, and overall rigor of ideas and results. This symposium brings together leading figures addressing a variety of these current topics, discussing new mechanisms for scientific discourse within the field of cognitive neuroscience. This symposium will be of interest to a broad audience, from students to faculty to members of the general public interested in cognitive neuroscience.

Presentations

The first year of transition from NeuroImage to Imaging Neuroscience

Anastasia Yendiki¹; ¹Harvard Medical School

The move of scientific journals towards open access models was in principle a positive development, lifting barriers to knowledge for the general public. In practice, however, it shifted costs from the reader to the author; instead of institutions paying for their members to access journal articles through their library systems, individual investigators must pay for their articles to be published. As research funding typically comes from government grants, ultimately the cost is shifted to taxpayers. Recent years have seen these article publication costs (APCs) balloon, particularly for more successful and highly regarded journals, with no commensurate increase in research funding. This puts an undue burden on investigators, particularly those from less well-funded labs and under-resourced institutions or countries. Thus, a development aimed at democratizing who can access the products of research ended up exacerbating disparities in whose research can be accessed. In response to this troubling trend, and after unsuccessful attempts to negotiate a reduction in APCs with the for-profit publishing house Elsevier, the entire editorial board of the journals NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports resigned and started the journal Imaging Neuroscience, under the non-profit publisher MIT Press. This was a risky move from an established journal that, at the time, had an impact factor of 7.4 and was publishing almost 1000 papers a year, to a brand new one. I will discuss lessons from the first year of Imaging Neuroscience, the next steps in this endeavor, and how it can serve as a blueprint for the similar transitions in other journals.

The “publish, review, curate” model at eLife: How’s it working out?

Michael Frank¹; ¹Brown University

In 2021, just 10 years into its existence, eLife had already experienced a remarkable growth in popularity, and was viewed by many as among the most prestigious journals in which to publish life-sciences research. This was a paradoxical state of affairs, however, because although it met conventional criteria for “success” as a journal, it was dissonant with journal’s core philosophy of moving science away from the use of journal titles as a primary index for judging the quality of a paper. Consequently, in 2021, eLife adopted a radically new publishing model: submissions to eLife would only be considered if they were already publicly accessible preprints, and those selected for review would become “refereed preprints.” That is, eLife would no longer be in the business of deciding “what papers should be published,” but instead began acting as a curator of “already published” research (in the sense that every preprint can be said to have been “published” on a preprint server). A critical component to curation would be to solicit high-quality peer reviews, and to subsequently publish these reviews alongside the original paper (together with a rebuttal from the authors, at their discretion). This would encourage a move toward a culture in which a paper’s importance is determined in large part by its substantive evaluation by peer reviewers. In this presentation I will offer my perspective as a Senior Editor responsible for handling much of the cognitive neuroscience research submitted to eLife.

Gender citation balance reporting four years later: Is it working?

Jacqueline Fulvio¹, Brad Postle¹; ¹University of Wisconsin–Madison

Although the proportion of peer-reviewed publications authored by women has increased in the field of neuroscience in recent decades, the proportion of citations of women-led publications has not seen a commensurate increase. Analysis of citation practices at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JoCN) indicated this is a systemic problem impacting our own subfield of cognitive neuroscience. Given the important implications that such underrepresentation have on the careers of women researchers, a targeted intervention addressing this inequity in the way we carry out and communicate our science was needed. To that end, a new initiative at JoCN was launched. We developed a webtool that went "live" in late October, 2020, that accepts a reference list and returns the categorical gender breakdown of citations. Authors submitting to JoCN are encouraged, but not required, to use the tool to generate the ‘gender citation balance indices’ for the author gender categories and report them in their submission. Reviewers are invited to recommend papers from underrepresented author-gender groups that the authors might consider including in their revision. Analyses of JoCN citation practices over the past four years reveal that the proportion of authors choosing to use the tool has steadily increased, and, critically, the gender citation balance of the journal has improved, indicating that yes, the initiative is working.

JoCNForum: a single archival platform for discussion of cognitive neuroscience

William Matchin¹; ¹University of South Carolina

A firm grounding for science requires subjecting our ideas to scrutiny; doing so requires the courage of being open to the possibility that our ideas are based on mistakes, lack of knowledge, or the human predisposition to only highlight evidence that supports our views. Thus, we rely on other experts to evaluate and weigh in. However, the social media landscape falls short of supporting effective scientific discourse. First, many platforms are unmoderated and allow for rapid, impulsive responses. Thus, the tone can quickly decline, which not only adds noise to the discussion but can also discourage early career scientists from getting involved (e.g., for fear of offending senior figures in the field). Second, the social media landscape is fragmented. Valuable discussions that unfold in one channel may go unnoticed by important segments of the community. Finally, many illuminating discussions and insightful points have been lost to the void of the internet, and cannot be incorporated into the scientific record. With this context, a team from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience has launched a new initiative—the JoCN Discussion Forum. JoCNForum provides a single archival platform (via generation of DOIs for each post) for moderated discussion and debate of topics of relevance to the conduct and dissemination of cognitive neuroscience research. Light moderation comes from an editorial team that will approve all content before it is posted. JoCNForum is editorially distinct from JoCN but shares the mission of being an authoritative vehicle for dissemination of high-quality content to the cognitive neuroscience community.