I’m about to finalise the training programme for this community - this is your last chance to share your input. Tell me what aspects of academic publishing and building your expert profile would you like to develop.

Many of you are here to network but we don’t often know who is doing what - let’s change this: In a few words, please explain what is your core research area. Enjoy!

AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not. I feel that we leave something out by using AI to do everything - we're losing the human creativity and uniqueness. But on the other hand, pressing deadlines and piling amount of work forces us to think how we can be more productive - and AI can help with that. So what are your thoughts?

(Unless someone already figured out how to extend this… and forgot to share the method!) That’s the real constraint in academia is not talent and not lack of ambition. It's time. ​ And the higher you climb, the more people try to “spend” your time for you. - “Can you review this?” - “Can you join this board?” - “Can you guest-edit this special issue?” - “Can you jump on this committee?” - ... None of these requests are evil. But they are expensive. Because every “yes” silently steals time from something else: - Your research. - Your health. - Your family. - Your students. - Your lab. - Your community. And once you become an experienced academic, you hit a fork in the road: You can either invest your scarce hours into journal volunteering, running special issues, doing editorial work, contributing more to what I call "system maintenance". Or you can invest those hours into people. Early career researchers. The ones with potential… but not yet established careers. The ones who don’t need another gatekeeper. They need a sponsor. As for me, I chose the latter through this community. I’d rather spend my credibility making introductions, giving honest feedback, sharing what I’ve learned, and helping ECRs build careers that actually last, than collecting another “service” badge no one will remember in five years. Because journals will always find volunteers. But not every early career researcher finds someone who shows up.

It’s been an unusually busy break for me. To the extent I haven’t had time to sit down and plan for 2026. But if I were to list just 2 priorities it would be this: 1. Grow this community into number #1 research community (we need to be ambitious) 2. Develop training materials and deliver at least 2 sessions (one training per quarter; 2 for this community; 2 relevant to my professional capacity) That’s it - beyond my academic responsibilities. How about you? What do you plan this year? P.S. We run paper writing training this Friday. Will you be there?