This editor profile is the twenty-fourth in a series which will introduce you to a selection of our editors.
This week we have an interview with Michael Blackman, Editor-in-Chief of World Patent Information.

What gets you up in the morning?
The variety possible in retirement makes for many possibilities. One day it may be the pleasure of a summer trip to National Trust gardens in the UK. Another day it may be the challenge of a new article for the journal or the satisfaction of signing off an excellent article for publication.

What aspect of being an editor do you find most rewarding?
The chance in retirement to keep in touch and up to date with the profession that I have been involved in since 1965. I enjoy the opportunity to use my intellectual and organizational skills – a particular challenge with World Patent Information due to its unusual nature. Many articles are not from academic sources and often involve active encouragement and mentoring for authors new to writing for a peer-reviewed journal.

I still get a buzz out of starting each quarter with a largely empty issue to fill, and from pulling together the many threads to produce the next issue in good time. And it is very satisfying to encourage people to write articles when they didn’t think that they could.

Can you describe how it feels when you come across a groundbreaking paper?
Usually easily identified – exciting! Although sometimes you might not think an article is that good but from the download statistics it turns out it was much better than you thought. 

What advice would you give to a new editor?
Get as much advice, contacts, templates for often used letters from the previous editor. Taking on the editorship was a particular challenge for me as I had limited editorial experience, the previous Editor-in-Chief had been very ill and then died in post, and the journal was well behind in its publishing schedule and short of new articles! We turned that round and have since been improving the quality and topicality of the articles, the quality of the peer review process etc., with invaluable assistance from successive Associate Editors and Publishers at Elsevier. 

As an editor you need to think carefully about the commitment required, the time involved and your reason for doing the work. Build up a good range of contacts covering the many diverse aspects of your specialization, work closely with them, on a friendly informal basis wherever practical. Value the contributions of others, especially as an editor since you are heavily reliant on the goodwill of unpaid authors and referees!

How do you envision the role of the editor being different in year 2020?
It is obvious that we are moving increasingly to electronic publishing and that is tremendous. I expect that it will continue to develop as a step by step process over the next 10 years, as more electronic help is provided for editors. I can’t envision how my predecessors coped before the electronic developments we use now.

How do you balance your role as editor with your other roles?
It’s very important to have that balance established in your mind before you take it on because it can be very time consuming. As I am retired I tend to be quite flexible so I tend to do a bit of editorial work every day.

Why did you choose World Patent Information as your field of study?
I enjoyed chemistry at school and university, but realized that I did not want to do research as a career. So I looked at options for using chemical knowledge and interest in other fields, particularly in the public service area. The UK Intellectual Property Office offered a long term career as a chemical patent examiner, which worked out well, especially as later jobs within that Office provided wide opportunities to develop my interests in patent information systems and patent information dissemination. That in turn led to my new challenge as Editor-in-Chief of World Patent Information for the last 10 years, following retirement from the UK Intellectual Property Office after nearly 35 years.

What’s new in the field of Patent Information? How will this work impact our daily lives?
The world of patents is very varied. There are patents for pharmaceuticals but also door knobs and locks. So improvements can flow in almost any field of our lives from the commercialization of inventions disclosed in patents. There are 50 million patents worldwide and 1 million patent applications published every year. You think you know the field and in no time at all you don’t. Geographically there has been an explosion of activity in China and Korea. In terms of subject-area nanotechnology is a hot topic.

The kind of research we are publishing in World Patent Information is largely focused on the search and retrieval of patents. Searching for patents at the moment can be quite frustrating. The biggest limitation is that, in many systems, the search results are not ranked so the first result could be as relevant as the 200^th. When I started working in the field of patents it was just a pile of paper classified into a number of sections. Electronic compared with paper is fantastic but there is still a lot of work to be done in this area.

What is your biggest achievement?
In the UK Intellectual Property Office, getting the use of online patent searching spread throughout the organization in the early 1980s and setting up a commercial search service in the late 1980s. In the early years of the present decade, getting the ailing World Patent Information back on its feet and flourishing.

What is your favorite quote?
``Everything that can be invented has been invented,’’ the famous quote from 1899 attributed to Charles E Duell, then Commissioner of the US Patent Office. It’s easy to think that, but we are proved wrong time and again. People are always working away inventing new things. I have a particular interest in umbrellas for instance and you would be surprised how many improvements you can come up with for an umbrella. Inventors are constantly trying to get the best balance between sturdiness in wind and rain and lightness of the materials used. The strong misconception a lot of people have is that there can’t be that many patents because only groundbreaking inventions are patented but most patents are from people working on making small, but important, improvements to already existing things.

What are you currently reading?  Would you recommend it?  If so, why?
Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father: a story of race and inheritance’. Very interesting insight into his formative years. In terms of historical novels, currently ‘The Queen from Provence’ by Jean Plaidy.

Who or what is your biggest inspiration?
My family. 

What would you like your legacy to be?
The satisfaction of having pulled an ailing journal round, then continuously improving the content and responding to changes in the needs and priorities of our readers. I would like to be able to say that I left the journal in good order for my successor, with a strong and supportive Editorial Advisory Board and a high quality peer-review process.

What do you like to do for fun?
I enjoy reading, watching sport, studying paleontology and heraldry, traveling and being a grandfather.