Emilie Marcus, who will take over November 1 as editor of Cell, plans to emphasize engagement with the community and to keep the journal's focus broad. Marcus' goal is to ensure that Cell "lives up to its launching moniker as 'the journal of exciting biology,'" she told The Scientist.

As editor of Neuron for 3 years, Marcus and her team became known for open and informed relations with the scientific community through conference attendance, lab visits, and frequent phone calls and e-mails to contributors and reviewers.

"In my mind, scientific journals are services to the community, and we can only provide that service by being in contact with and knowing the community," she said. "You can call here and speak to an editor who knows about the science, is prepared to weigh in on it, and is excited about doing so. That's where the job satisfaction is for me."

"She's done a fine job at Neuron," said David Schubert, professor and head of the Cellular Neurobiology Lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Unlike many editors who are "more interested in the politics of the science," Marcus' interest is in the science itself, he said. "Journal editors have a tremendous amount of power in determining the careers of scientists," Schubert added. "It's good to have an editor who really cares about the science."

While at Neuron, Marcus expanded the journal's scope beyond cellular and molecular neuroscience to include systems and cognitive approaches, among others. "In the beginning, people told us it couldn't be done," she said.

"My interests for Cell are to have it be a very broad journal that covers all the biological sciences," she added, mentioning systems biology as a field poised to move closer to the "core scope" of the journal. "If it's in biology, and it's exciting, and it's a conceptual advance, I'd be happy to see Cell publish it."

With a print circulation of 10,000 and 850 electronic access site licenses, Cell typically receives 1300 manuscripts per year and publishes 250 articles. As editor of Cell, Marcus will be replacing Vivian Siegel, who departed in January to become executive director of the Public Library of Science, which published its first open-access journal this week.

Marcus has also been appointed executive editor of Cell Press, a position in which she will coordinate editorial policy among its nine journals.

Marcus called the open-access movement in journal publishing "an interesting new experiment" and said that Cell Press would be "prepared to move" if the experiment turns out to be successful and "in the interests of the community."

She expressed some concern about the potential for conflicts of editorial interest in the current model, since editorial costs are funded by author charges, which she said has the potential to affect the quality of papers accepted. But, Marcus added, "as any good scientist would do, we are watching the experiment and preparing for a variety of outcomes."

Marcus's deputy editors at Neuron, Kenneth Blum and Katja Brose, will be the acting editors of that journal while her successor is chosen. The deadline for applications is December 1, 2003.