The new Editor-in-Chief, Brian Pogue, gives an overview of the biomedical optics community

Pogue, Brian W

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Dartmouth Digital Commons (Dartmouth College)

Dartmouth College Dartmouth Digital Commons Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty Faculty Work 1-4-2018 Biomedical Optics Scientific Community Brian W. Pogue Dartmouth College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa  Part of the Bioimaging and Biomedical Optics Commons Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation Pogue, Brian W., "Biomedical Optics Scientific Community" (2018). Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty. 3929. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/3929 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Work at Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty by an authorized administrator of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, please contact dartmouthdigitalcommons@groups.dartmouth.edu. Biomedical Optics ScientificCommunityBrian W. PogueBrian W. Pogue, “Biomedical Optics Scientific Community,” J. Biomed. Opt. 23(1), 010101 (2018),doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.23.1.010101.Downloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/Journal-of-Biomedical-Optics on 26 Jul 2019Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-useBiomedical Optics ScientificCommunityThe biomedical optics world today is thriving, with leadershipin industry, biomedical market share, dynamic academic andgovernment laboratories, and an actively supportive profes-sional society in SPIE. Part of the key to bringing a voiceto this field is that SPIE supports the single largestinternational conference on this topic, and publishes leadingjournals that help shape the peer-reviewed advancement ofthe field. The magnitude of the growth seen in biomedicaloptics over the last 20 years would have been unimaginablewhen SPIE started this journal back in 1996. So today, as thefield continues to grow and differentiate, publications such asthe Journal of Biomedical Opticsmust continue to define theirrole in this expanding roadmap. Historically, the role was veryclear, in that the journal was the singular home for scholarlypublishing in biomedical optics, and the flagship journal for theSPIE biomedical optics community of researchers. Thosewho attend SPIE BiOS, and consider SPIE their professionalsociety, choose to publish their biomedical optics work in thisjournal because it is part of their community.A defining difference between publishers is how they inter-act with the scientific community. For example, journals areoften singularly encoded by their impact factor, but to focuson this singular metric ignores the role of the scientific com-munity in charting research directions of the field. Publishingwell-developed work with recognized peers has a deeperimpact that pushes the field in productive directions and isreinforced through direct communication at affiliated confer-ences. In science, there has always been a drive to publishin the highest impact journal feasible, based upon the workin the manuscript, and this is one of the keys to collegial com-petition and striving for excellence in research. However, it iscritical to observe that the highest impact journals rarely con-tribute to a specialized scientific field beyond a handful ofhand-picked articles. Instead, it is the specialty or topic-based journals that carry the load of scientific developments,as is the case in biomedical optics with this journal. The sci-entists who choose to publish their work with SPIE benefitfrom a large international readership, which is wholly withintheir peers, and their papers are directly available to SPIEmembers through journal email alerts and subscriptions.Additionally, leading scientists in the field are invited to be onthe editorial boards of specialty journals, and it is their shep-herding of manuscripts through the peer-review process thatmaintains the quality and impartiality needed for the scientificpublishing system towork. There are journals that select papersbased on their own view of impact, without the vetting of a peerscientist-editor, a process that is inherent to scholarly publish-ing. These journals often don’t represent the scientific commu-nity via a society, which people join with the intention of shapingthe field together. Also, in the biomedical optics field, manyjournals are run by smaller societies, but few have the advan-tage of synergy with such an important conference and commu-nity as SPIE BiOS. The synergy between a journal, a society,and a conference cannot be underestimated in defining thevoice and direction of a field, which has impact in far-reachingareas such as national funding and human translation. Thesefeatures form the backbone of our scientific community pro-vided by SPIE BiOSand the SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics.Another aspect that defines a journal and the impact of thepapers is the way in which we interact with the authors as col-leagues or leaders of a collective field of study. Today we live ina world where search engines largely define what publishedreports we read, and people rarely pick up a physical journal tobrowse and read anymore. This transition has been very usefulgiven the vast ocean of publications and activity; however, thereare still singular moments in this electronic barrage where wecan recognize the origin of a collective body of work. We canappreciate the clarity when we receive a collection of papersthat is from our community of fellow researchers. It is at thesetimes, when a table of contents email arrives, and the names arerecognizable as people who have presented at SPIE BiOS andwho have chosen to publish in a journal that represents a cohe-sive field. The Journal of Biomedical Optics offers their table ofcontents alerts as a way to keep up with recently publishedarticles and as a community outreach, as do most journals.What JBO does for the community goes well beyond this,because it is connected with events and programming at theBIOS conference, as part of the society-driven approach toensuring that new students meet each other and meet expe-rienced scientists. Additionally, new and old scientists canmeet editorial board members and discuss advances andmanuscripts at the BIOS conference. It is this communitythat makes the difference for a journal that is published by,and read by, the same group of scientists. I believe that allbiomedical optics researchers and translational scientistscan find their home in this SPIE journal.In taking a long-term view of where the field of biomedicaloptics has been and where it is going, it apparent that SPIEand its conferences and journals are the largest center ofmass of our field. SPIE helped define and amplify this fieldof development, and BiOS and the Journal of BiomedicalOptics continue to partner in being a conduit. I encourageall researchers to think about who they view as their scientificpeers, and to work with SPIE over time to define this commu-nity. I have been deeply honored to be asked to be the editor-in-chief of the journal and look forward to working with thepeople in this field to shape the future scope and directions.Brian W. PogueEditor-in-Chief© 2018 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)Journal of Biomedical Optics 010101-1 January 2018 • Vol. 23(1)EditorialDownloaded From: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/Journal-of-Biomedical-Optics on 26 Jul 2019Terms of Use: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/terms-of-use

Biomedical Optics Scientific Community

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Biomedical Optics Scientific Community

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