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Immunohorizons
Immunohorizons
IH
ImmunoHorizons
2573-7732
AAI

immunohorizons_2400057
10.4049/immunohorizons.2400057
Editorial
ImmunoHorizons Is the Cure
Kaplan Mark H. Editor-in-Chief
ImmunoHorizons On Twitter/X and BlueSky @statfourwork
8 2024
20 8 2024
8 8 550551
05 8 2024
17 7 2024
Copyright © 2024 The Authors
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Unported license.
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pmcI am sure you have all received e-mails that have that semi-inspirational quote at the end of the signature block. Many are as empty and instantly forgettable as an episode of almost anything on a streaming service. But one stuck with me (and I will credit my friend and colleague John Ryan for using it): “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Variations of it have been attributed to Plato, Philo, MacLaren, and possibly others. But while the source of the quote is unsettled, the sentiment has never been more timely. We are all engaged in battles, some personal, some philosophical, some professional.

At any annual meeting of the AAI, one of the highlights is seeing colleagues who you do not see that often (as well as meeting new ones). But this year, more than most, I noticed that many had that thousand-yard stare of someone coming back from a battlefield. Now, I am sure you can come up with a lot of explanations, including the most obvious: “Mark, they were just trying to ignore you. They did not want to talk to you. Be more perceptive.” And sure, that is very possible. Maybe even likely. It is also possible they were trying to find the right meeting room in the cavernous McCormick Place. It is also possible they were exhausted from trying to find someplace to eat near the McCormick Center. We are scientists; we can always come up with another hypothesis to explain an observation. But maybe they really were battle-weary from the daily struggle to survive in our current climate.

While I have written before about the never-ending rejection of being a scientist (1), it is something that most of us understand as we choose the career. But it has been getting worse with shrinking paylines for grants and the challenges of finding appropriate reviewers for article submissions. On the editorial side, we have even coined the phrase “reviewer fatigue” to describe the feeling when you are asked to review and review and review and ultimately you just can’t take it anymore. You have to say “No!” because it just becomes too much. It is bad on both sides of the review process.

And it is not just rejection and reviewer fatigue. A colleague shared an article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson that focused on the expansion of meeting time in the working day. He was not specifically talking about academia, but what he wrote was very apropos. He noted that Zoom culture has facilitated an increase in meetings as expertise is needed to advise in more and more areas. He also noted the underappreciated “tax” of these meetings; the additional time needed to schedule the meetings and the necessary transition time as someone moves from the meeting back to actual work. I use the term “actual work” because it is hard to consider many meetings as productive. Too many meetings could have been e-mails. Many meetings could be much shorter if a few key people had pre-established basics that did not need the “whole team” there to define. Hell, meetings could be shorter if leaders who kept saying “I want to respect your time” stopped saying that, both because when said repeatedly it takes up more time and because, in saying it, it proves the opposite. Mr. Thompson writes that employees had so many meetings during the day, that actual work was occurring in the evening, after what most would consider the workday. The overall point is clear: this new culture is adding to the overall feeling of battle fatigue.

At this point you might be wondering, “Gee, Mark, why so serious? I was hoping for another editorial about oversized genitalia” (2). Well, the thing is, I am coming to the end of my term as Editor-in-Chief. It has been fun, watching the journal grow, working with authors, editors, and staff. In fact, those last two groups were rewarded with a limited-edition commemorative T-shirt that highlighted the last 5 y (Fig. 1). The front had the ImmunoHorizons (IH) logo with one of my favorite slogans: “Publishing immunology since before the pandemic.” That seems like so long ago. Anyway, my term ends this year. And when something ends, one gets a little reflective. And to paraphrase the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” you ask yourself, self, “how did I get here?” Maybe also, how did I survive the battle this long? In retrospect, becoming Editor-in-Chief at the same time as I became a department Chair, which just happened to be the freshman year of a global pandemic, was perhaps not the smartest thing I have ever done. But I guess that is what they mean by 2020 hindsight.

FIGURE 1. The back of a limited-edition commemorative T-shirt.

Importantly, I have the cure to your rejection fatigue. As I have stated many times in these editorials, the antidote to endless rejection is IH. When you get an invitation to transfer your Journal of Immunology–submitted article to IH, it is saying, “We like you, we want you, and if you fix your article like we tell you to, we will publish you.” When was the last time anyone proclaimed love for you that explicitly? And we mean it. Transferred papers, which to be clear are already reviewed by the Journal of Immunology reviewers and revised by the authors, have a >85% acceptance rate. And almost all of the rest are “Accept with minor revisions.” Those are pretty good odds that you can put your baby (article) to bed. In fact, it is all summarized in this limerick:We asked for your transferred submissions,

And though there weren’t any commissions,

It’s post-peer review

Less rejection for you

And no danger of endless revisions.

I need to be truthful and say that this was paraphrased from a version I wrote for the Detroit Immunological Society Newsletter ∼30 y ago. Some of you might be saying, who knew there was a Detroit Immunological Society, never mind that they had a newsletter? Well, there is (or at least there was) and they did. They had really good meetings where we talked about immunology and no one ever said, “I want to be respectful of your time.”

I am almost finished rambling. I will just say that there is possibly only a couple more editorials from me. I promised some staff that my last would be in verse. Hopefully, that too will put a smile on your rejection-fatigued face.
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References

1 Kaplan, M. H. 2022. Maybe that editor is just not that into you. Immunohorizons 6 : 741–742.36426966
2 Kaplan, M. H. 2024. On oversized genitalia and other submissions. Immunohorizons 8 : 227.38436565
