 My name is Maria Policronidou and I'm a senior scientific editor at Molecular Systems Biology, one of the five journals published by Embo Press. How did I start working as a scientific editor? So I did a PhD in cell biology and biochemistry followed by a two-year postdoc, so rather short, and during my postdoc I started exploring career options that were outside of academia and away from the bench. And since what I always really enjoyed was reading papers and learning about new developments in many different fields, I decided to apply for scientific editor jobs because I thought that fits my interests quite well, and here I am 10 years later, I still work as an editor and I enjoy it very much. What I really enjoy about my job is that I get to learn a lot about new biological discoveries, new methodological developments, I learn all this from the manuscripts that are submitted to the journals, so I have access to this information very early on. It's also very nice to see how the studies are shaped into their final form after the review process, and I always try to make sure that the authors who submit to our journal get a constructive review process in which their study really improves and a good editorial experience, and it feels really good when authors who have worked with me tell me that they felt like their manuscript was in good hands and that they were happy with the experience they got during the process. Something else that I really enjoy is that we get to go to many conferences and scientific events, so I meet many interesting people across all career stages, and I have to say I feel much more embedded in the scientific community now that I work as an editor compared to how it was when I was doing science myself. Of course there are also some parts of the job that are not very enjoyable, one of them being that we very frequently have to communicate negative decisions to people so that their manuscript has been rejected. We know that this is frustrating for the authors and it's something that I don't enjoy doing. What I try to do is to always clearly communicate in a constructive way this bad news, this decision about the rejection, to make sure that I give the authors some clear directions about what they could do to make the study better suited for our journal or to offer them options for transfers, for publication in another journal in the EboPress family. Transparency and efficiency are both very important processes in publishing. Transparency in publishing touches on many different aspects. It is very important because the goal of publishing is to move science forward and in order to move science forward in an efficient way we need to make sure that we trust the findings we publish, so this is where transparency comes in. There is transparency in the sense of providing enough information about how a study was conducted. This refers to the materials and methods used, how the data was made available and things along those lines. There is transparency in terms of authorship. This is very important as well, who was involved, what exactly did they contribute and when we have this information we can make sure that everyone gets the credit they deserve but that they are also bearing the responsibility for the data they produced and the findings that they describe. And then there is also transparency in terms of the editorial and the review process, so what we have been doing at EboPress since almost 15 years now is publishing all the referee reports, the editors comments and the authors responses to those comments, alongside every paper that we publish. This is very important because it demystifies the review and the editorial process. Everything and only the information is available for the readers. They can see exactly what happened during the review process, what kind of issues they were raised and how a study changed and was shaped into its final form because of the review process. And finally another aspect regarding transparency in publishing that is quite important is the costs of the process and again something that we do at EboPress since three years is that we make on our website available at the financial information that is related to the costs and the revenue related to our publishing. Efficiency in publishing is another very important point, unfortunately publishing tends to be frequently a very slow process. There are even exceptional cases where papers take a couple of years from the moment that they are submitted until the moment when they are published and one of the bottlenecks in the publishing process is the review process. It's very essential in order to ensure that the studies that are published are solid and good quality but for that reason it's a process that is very time consuming and it becomes even more time consuming when a manuscript is submitted to multiple journals one after the other each of which involves a separate round of reviews so there are multiple rounds of review one after the other. So this is a serious bottleneck and there are several initiatives in order to tackle this one of them is review commons for example review commons is a general agnostic review platform that was launched in 2019 as a collaboration between Ebo and Asabayo and the way it works is that the authors submit their manuscript to review commons it is reviewed once without having a specific journal in mind and then the authors get a referred preprint which they can choose where to submit in one of the affiliate journals of review commons without having any additional rounds of of review and another aspect of the process that sometimes can be time consuming in publishing is the revision process sometimes there are multiple rounds of major revisions and this is something that at Ebo Press we really want to make sure that we avoid for that reason we restrict our editorial policy is to restrict major revisions to a single round and to really make sure that we focus on requesting experiments and analysis that are key for supporting the main conclusions of the paper but they do not go beyond that so from one hand we know that we need to be efficient in publishing because researchers need to have their study published within a reasonable time frame so that they can progress in their career and that they can also proceed with performing follow-up work after publishing each paper so this is where efficiency is key to make this process as streamlined and as possible however we cannot compromise on the review process and on ensuring that the quality of what we publish is is good and that science is reproducible and reliable and especially because unfortunately there are many issues that are raised frequently about reproducibility and lack of trust in science sometimes there are even cases of data integrity issues or even fraud and I think losing trust in science is something that we cannot allow to happen and this is where transparency comes in and it's really key to mitigate this problem so by having transparency in how a study was conducted it solves many problems regarding reproducibility because the data is available the methods are available it is clear who has done what and who is responsible for which part of the study in case there are questions later on and with respect of transparency regarding the review and the editorial process again it's it's very important for building trust because it demystifies the process it doesn't let any question marks about things happening behind the scenes when a paper is published because all the information is available and because all the information is available then the readers can decide for themselves whether they trust this work or not and they can make their own informed opinions about it