About the Publishing Lab
Receiving direct feedback from the scientific community will help us focus on the things that you find most important and desirable.
We are very keen to hear your insights and suggestions and are grateful for your time and effort.
Sign up and get involved
Participate in developing new tools and services. Unsubscribe anytime.
Sign up To register, please send an email to [email protected](opens in new tab/window) with your interests and preferences
Accept invite You will only be invited to test ideas that match your interests.
Schedule time Indicate your availability and you will be contacted for an interview at a time convenient for you
Use your imagination
Help us think outside the box
By participating in the Publishing Lab, you will be directly involved in new publishing concepts, can help shape these up, or even propose ideas that we haven’t thought of yet. With the Publishing Lab we aim to develop tools and services that help researchers with their everyday tasks by soliciting direct feedback from a wide range of our authors, reviewers and editors, in all stages of their careers.
We encourage you to be imaginative, honest and open, and we don't mind receiving contrary views (feel free to play devil’s advocate!). Consider this your chance to shape the publishing future.
Logic will bring you from A to Z. Imagination will bring you everywhere
- A. Einstein
Pick ’n’ choose
Participate only when the topic appeals to you
Upon registration, we will ask you about your publishing experiences and roles, so that we can make sure we only invite you to participate in testing ideas that are relevant to you. Testing typically takes place through a telephone interview or a quick poll. Obviously, it is always up to you to accept an invitation – we fully understand researchers tend to have a busy schedule and not all topics may appeal to you.
We know you are busy
Rest assured we won't ask for too much of your time
Once registered, it is entirely up to you whether to accept an invitation to participate for a particular experiment - we only want you to engage with concepts that matter to you. Interviews will typically take up an hour or less. In some cases, we will ask you to briefly look at a prototype before the interview, but that will be clearly indicated in the invitation. In some cases, we just want to quickly run new concepts or ideas by our researchers for us to keep going. For this, we may be sending you a quick poll; short surveys that will only take a minute or two from your time but will help us tremendously verifying our direction. We want to make the Publishing Lab easy and accessible. And most of all, we want it to be a fun place where we can informally collaborate with the people we care about most – our authors, reviewers and editors.