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I joined the RSC in 2016 after working as a postdoctoral researcher for a few years. By that point I’d settled in to lab work – if computational chemistry counts as lab work – but saw the Publishing Editor role as a great way to apply my broad scientific interests and the skills I’d picked up helping to improve drafts of papers.

This year, in addition to working on my usual journals I’ve been coordinating a Faraday Discussion. This has been a particularly interesting challenge.

The Faraday Discussion is a hybrid of a conference and a special journal issue which calls for a lot of editorial work. Due to the unusual format of the meeting, papers have to be received and edited on a strict deadline, and the conference discussion itself has to be honed into a final written volume. That means a lot of deadlines, editing and production work running in parallel, coordinating with many researchers at once as you make sure their manuscripts are in on time and that you haven’t changed the meaning of an important scientific point trying to fix a typo.

Although a Faraday Discussion is a lot of work, it’s interesting to be in a spectator role at a conference. Working as an editor is a great way to broaden your scientific horizons as you need to be able to put all sorts of papers in some sort of context. A Faraday meeting takes a particular subject – Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering in my case – and lets you focus on it for several months. Editing the papers means you pick up a sense of the major controversies and unanswered questions in that field, and then you have a ring-side seat to the debates that try to push the field forward at the meeting itself.

A side benefit of the Faraday Discussion meeting is that you get to travel. My meeting was in Glasgow, which meant I was able to enjoy one of my favourite Scottish delicacies – deep fried pizza, which Cambridge chip shops inexplicably haven’t adopted.

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Alex is a Publishing Editor working in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Publishing Department. To see if there are any current vacancies go to 'RSC: Latest Vacancies' Blog or subscribe to 'RSC: Latest Vacancies' by Email
 

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I joined the RSC as a Publishing Editor in January 2013 after completing a PhD in inorganic chemistry at the University of Warwick. After working in a lab for my PhD, I decided that I would like a job that still focused on science, but wasn’t lab-based – the Publishing Editor role at the RSC seemed like a perfect fit!

As a member of the Materials, Interfaces & Engineering team, I work on nine of the RSC journals – Journal of Materials Chemistry A, B and C, Materials Horizons, Biomaterials Science, Polymer Chemistry, Soft Matter, Reaction Chemistry & Engineering, and Molecular Systems Design & Engineering. The two engineering-based journals were launched at the end of 2015 and it has been really interesting to see them develop since then. Of course, there were the obligatory cakes featuring the first covers to celebrate the launches!

As a Publishing Editor, I work on the peer review of manuscripts, taking them all the way from initial submission to acceptance, and the editing of manuscripts. As well as these core tasks, there are many opportunities to take on extra responsibilities – cover commissioning, Associate Editor support, journal coordination, and Faraday Discussions, to name just a few. I have particularly enjoyed working on Faraday Discussions, as you, along with another Publishing Editor, take the volume right from the initial submissions through to publishing the discussions in a book. This involves attending the conference and managing the forum. It is a great opportunity to develop many different skills!

After almost 5 years at the RSC, I am really happy that I decided to make the move – the RSC is a great place to work and Cambridge is a great place to live!

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Suzanne is a Publishing Editor working in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Publishing Department. To see if there are any current vacancies go to 'RSC: Latest Vacancies' Blog or subscribe to 'RSC: Latest Vacancies' by Email