 I have a research background in chemistry so I did a PhD and postdoc, postdocs or research in organic chemistry and I enjoyed my research but I was ready to move away from the bench. I was keen to be involved in science but not do science and I was keen to pursue a career that would broaden my perspective in terms of subject areas rather than focus me in on a particular area of chemistry. So I joined Nature Communications in 2009 as one of the launch editors there and became a senior editor there and then I moved to Scientific Reports in 2013 and I was attracted to the idea of working on a an inclusive and high-quality journal and being able to contribute to the development of that. There's no very typical day on Scientific Reports. As chief editor I oversee a group of eight in-house editors and we oversee the editorial decision-making process and the peer-review process on the journal and those processes are managed directly by our external editorial board members so they are the people who decide whether to send a manuscript out to peer-review they recruit peer-reviewers and they make decisions after peer reviews. This year we've also had a lot of projects to enhance levels of author service across the journal and we're really starting to see those projects bear fruit particularly in terms of significantly improved times to decision. Scientific Reports, given the scale of our operations here, there's an awful lot of variety in the role and I get a lot of satisfaction of having a varied role but I think my highlight and what I enjoy the most is working with our in-house editors and with our external editorial board members and developing those teams such that we provide a high level of service to our authors and we oversee a robust peer-review process and a robust editorial process and through being able to develop those teams and the processes on the journal we've been able to build a trusted and high quality inclusive journal. Scientific Reports publishes research from all areas of the natural and clinical sciences. In terms of the editorial criteria of the journal we don't make publication decisions based on perceived, important significance or impact but the rigorous peer-review processes we have on the journal ensure that we only publish high quality robust science so we're looking for papers that make an original contribution to existing knowledge. We're looking for papers where the conclusions are fully supported by the data presented. We're looking for reproducible science that is thoroughly and well reported and we're looking for papers where the conclusions are presented in the context of previous literature. Because Scientific Reports is an inclusive journal sometimes people think that that means that we publish all submissions. Of course that isn't the case and the current accept rate of the journal is about 48%. We have rigorous and robust editorial and peer-review process in place and those processes are overseen by our expert editorial external editorial board members and these processes ensure that we are only publishing high quality robust science. To read our submission guidelines carefully and ensure that they have complied with all relevant policies before submitting to the journal and then they should ensure that the central conclusions of the paper are fully supported by the data and the results that are presented and in terms of some specific advice in sort of presenting and writing the paper you may want to pay particular attention to titles and abstracts. These are the things that our board members will see and will read when deciding whether to to handle your paper and they're what the peer reviewers see when they're deciding whether to agree to review your paper. So if you make it clear within your title and within your abstract what the essential conclusions of the paper are what you are reporting you're more likely to find that your paper proceeds swiftly through the peer-review process and of course ensuring that your title and your abstracts in particular are of high quality and do make the conclusions of your paper clear help to increase the impact of your paper when it is published. Academic publishing in an editorial career tends to attract people who are very passionate about science but perhaps are ready to to leave the bench so to be involved in science but perhaps not necessarily do science. It attracts people who want to broaden their their exposure to different subject areas and people who are very interested in reading and writing. When becoming an editor for the first time or embarking on an editorial career there's a steep learning curve involved I mean this is it's often a career change for for most people who become an editor for the first time and so high levels of resilience are key as our good time management skills and we're also looking for that broader passion in science so that broader interest beyond someone's own area of interest. A good knowledge of the peer-review process is also important.