Being a researcher, being an editor, being an author.

With me, it happened in the beginning of the last decade (1990). When the post of editor of the unit's periodical became vacant, the Director, like most Directors, looked around him in search of his best friend or his worst enemy. He picked me for one of those two reasons, which one of them I have not found out. But it really does not make that much of a difference given the size of the problem and the responsibility involved. What changes when a researcher becomes an editor? Or better yet, does anything change? The answer is yes, something does change, and that change is for the much better: the editor learns to " de-contextualize " , to distinguish good scientific practice from the specialty he is dedicated to. I explain: within a certain area, the researcher's scientific procedure makes a whole, a single body, integrated with the area itself. The good practices of both research and science are learned together, and they end up being undistinguishable. The first one is almost automatic, it works in a nearly unconscious manner. It is developed with the necessary rigorousness, but remains in the background. Even when giving his/her opinion about an article, or taking part in the examining board of a Master's Degree or a Ph.D., the researcher is more concerned with the scientific aspect than with the methodological aspect. Or when commenting on the latter, he/she does it in a somewhat imprecise, vague way – but which, curiously, is pertinent in more than 99% of the cases. Regarding this, we teach our graduate students: authors always think their text is perfect, but that is almost never true. Sometimes it is difficult for them to even understand why the evaluator earmarked or commented a certain idea, a given stretch or a particular construction. The recommendation, however, is: never discard thoughtlessly an observation made by an evaluator; perhaps he/she may have not totally grasped the idea in that particular point, but he/she felt there's something strange there. A review is thus almost certainly necessary. What changes when you become an editor? You begin to see the methodology, the argumentation, the exposition, the selection and the way the ideas fit together as separate from the scientific content proper. Yes, an article is an integration of procedure, content and presentation, but science is transmitted efficiently only when those three elements are present and linked together …