Opening up the JCN toolbox

Abstract

For more than a decade, the Journal of Comparative Neurology has had a firm policy that we did not publish "methods" papers. The point of this policy was that we wanted our research articles to focus on new findings that enlighten us about aspects of the structure, function, and development of neural systems. We did not want to become a repository for papers that simply championed a new method but did not otherwise advance the field in a scientific sense.Yet, over the years, we were presented periodically with papers that provided important methodological advances, which we thought deserved broad attention. In most cases, we were able to persuade the authors to apply the advance to a scientific problem, to produce new data that would justify publishing the paper in JCN. This process, however, always felt awkward, and the resulting papers often were more notable for the methodological advance than the scientific advances.At our Editorial Board meeting last Fall, we therefore agreed that JCN would change its policy on publishing papers that focus on methodology. We still do not want to publish papers that simply describe a method, but we do want to bring forward a new category of papers that we hope will change the ways in which we do our work in a more broad generic sense, the JCN Toolbox.The hallmark of a Toolbox paper is that it should review critically an area of neuroscience methodology, potentially providing additional new methods or improvements but always putting them into perspective in ways that we hope will allow our readers to challenge, and perhaps change and improve, their own work. The first paper published under this new policy appeared in JCN in January of this year (Lavanex From this point forward, we will denote Toolbox papers with that designation, so that they are easier to identify. The paper by van den Pol and colleagues in the current issue is the first to carry the Toolbox label. This study reviews the use of viral vectors for introducing new genes into the brain and demonstrates a novel method for rapidly introducing new genes into neurons and permitting electrophysiological observations on transfected cells. We hope that this method, and variations that will be stimulated by this paper, will have broad application. We have other papers in the Toolbox series in the works and hope that we can stimulate our colleagues to contribute their best ideas for improving the ways in which we do our science through this category of publication. The groundbreaking series of papers that can result would surely become "must-read" material for neuroscientists and attract new readers to JCN, furthering our mission to publish the most exciting research in systems neuroscience.