10 Feb Why should you share your innovative work with INNOVATION?
Mani Alikhani, Editor in Chief | Feb 10, 2018
If you are an unorthodox researcher like us, anytime you start a new project you have two main periods of sleepless nights. However, the nature of these nights is quite different. At the beginning of your project, after you tried tirelessly to fund your ideas by knocking at the door of every governmental or private agency until you cannot feel your fingers anymore, on an innocent night you will open your e-mail and there it is – the answer to all those years of hard work. And after you gather all your courage, you open that e-mail and you feel almost paralyzed. You lay down in your bed in frustration and disbelief at the comments of the grant reviewers who claim your hypothesis is too risky (in other words too innovative) for them to give you money and requires way more data to support it. This leaves you asking, ‘If I had the data why would I be applying for funding?’
But, you soldier on. You scrape together as much funding as you can, you engage enthusiastic and very hard-working students and fellows, and you manage to gather enough data to submit your manuscript. This is when the second period of sleepless nights occurs. After waiting a seemingly endless amount of time (does it really take months to review a manuscript?), you get the e-mail. You can hear your heart beat and it does not matter how strong mentally you prepare yourself for the comments of the reviewers, no preparation is ever enough. It hits you right in the face. Now you are not paralyzed anymore. On the contrary, you cannot even sit for one second. You jump back on your feet with anger, pacing in your room, shaking your hands in the air as if you are in a heated conversation with the reviewers. If only they could see what you see! Of course, your study does not support the previous studies. Why do reviewers emphasize that? That was the whole point! How can they not see it? If your work agrees with previous studies, then what was the need for publishing something that everyone already knows? Then it would not be innovative. Then it would not be revolutionary.
I do not have any advice for you to get through your sleepless nights for lack of funding. Perseverance and the belief that there will be a better tomorrow are your best approaches. But, for the second type of restless nights, I have a solution.
A few months ago, a few of us who thrive by pushing research boundaries (and experience the binary sleeplessness and frustration that comes with it), joined forces to create a new journal – INNOVATION. The purpose of creating a new journal was several-fold. We want to give a fair chance to new ideas, especially if they are too controversial or too premature for mainstream scientists. Ideas that take years to prove and gain acceptance. We recognized the desperate need of a journal for risk-taking, truly cutting edge, scientists.
Equally important, we did not want those rare innovations that do make it into the literature to get lost among thousands and thousands of inconsequential publications. We want to bring innovations into the spotlight, expose them and promote them.
And finally, we want to create a place for like-minded people and companies to meet each other. INNOVATION would be a one-stop shop for industry looking for new ideas, where they can meet the inventors and their inventions.
As inventors we know time is of the essence. INNOVATION will review the articles very fast so researchers will not wait months to find out if their article is publishable. We also encourage our authors to utilize preprint servers, such as arXiv and BioRxiv, to let the world know that they are way ahead of the curve in their field.
As innovators we know that science does not have borders. Why, then, should a journal have borders? INNOVATION will be a hub for all bright minds from different fields in biomedical research, engineering, implementation science and the array of medical and dental specialties. After all, we learn from and inspire each other to develop creative approaches as we collectively push the boundaries of science.
Allow me to clarify a few points before we go further. We wholeheartedly support innovation and new ideas. But, we do not support weak methodology or flawed experimental design. We are a peer-reviewed journal and you need to show your peers that you take your research very seriously. Impress them by your passion and rigor and let them help you in your journey.
As with any new journal, INNOVATION does not have an impact factor yet, but with your contribution we will be very strong very soon. I hope that does not discourage you. You can have a real impact in the future of science and its applications and that is the most important factor.
I hope INNOVATION will bring you some piece of mind and that you will continue to create beautiful science. The future of human beings depends on that.
And I sure hope your next sleepless nights will be due to the excitement of publishing in and reading INNOVATION!