New Challenges and Changes for JUNE.

As most of you are probably aware, JUNE has faced a major challenge during the last few months. Unfortunately, some misguided individual has hacked into our website and implanted several destructive viruses that crippled access to the journal and delayed the launching of this issue. Readers who tried to access JUNE during the past few months were greeted with less-than-welcoming warning from Google: “this site may harm your computer.” Needless to say, this situation caused a great deal of consternation for me and our fellow colleagues on the JUNE Editorial Board. In response, we have taken measures to increase the security of our website and moved to an entirely new service. Our webmaster, Ron Stamey, has worked diligently to rescue our files, deconstructing and now reconstructing a new website for JUNE. The silver lining to this unfortunate state of affairs is that Ron has provided us with a new, updated front page and we have used this opportunity to try to improve our site by introducing new features that will be helpful to our readers, including access to newly accepted articles for the forthcoming issue. Hopefully, you will find the new changes, in the response to the unforeseen challenges we faced, as an improvement. During the forced hiatus in launching our new issue, I had the opportunity to discuss new ideas and suggestions for improving JUNE at this year’s PKAL/FUN Workshop at Macalester College in July. Interestingly, one of the suggestions was to provide earlier access to some of the forthcoming articles, a feature which we hope to be instituting with this issue. Another suggestion was to provide a mechanism whereby updates to back issues could be made by authors. For example, if an author of an article in an earlier edition of JUNE on how to build a better—let’s say, maze, not mousetrap—wanted to update the archived article to include new, less expensive, and better materials, this will now be possible, and our readers can be alerted of this update on the title page of the latest issue. Another possible change would be to institute Chris Korey’s exciting idea of having JUNE provide peer-reviewed teaching tools to be posted on websites, such as the one Richard Olivo is proposing to initiate. This idea captured the attention of many of the participants at the workshop who have expressed interest in finding video clips or interactive demonstrations that could be used in their undergraduate neuroscience courses. In addition to discussing changes in content and delivery, the participants at the Workshop also provided positive feedback for initiatives to expand JUNE to three or four issues per year. This change would make it easier for us to achieve our goal of being listed in Medline. In addition, the hard work of our Associate Editor, Bill Grisham, was acknowledged by the positive response his suggested copyright policy received. Pending approval by the Editorial Board, Bill will be contacting authors of articles from previous JUNE issues to sign the new copyright agreement. Finally, an interesting suggestion—charging page costs for non-FUN members who want to publish in JUNE--was brought up at the Workshop. This suggestion will be discussed at the next meeting of our Editorial Board. Despite the challenges that JUNE has been facing, it was heartening to hear several references at the Workshop to past articles in JUNE and suggestions for potential roles that JUNE can play in furthering FUN initiatives. When Barbara Lom and Julio Ramirez were starting JUNE, one of their first challenges was to solicit sufficient submissions from which to select high-quality articles for the early issues. Barbara, Julio, and their fellow Editorial Board members visited the teaching of neuroscience posters at the annual SfN meetings to encourage those presenters of particularly relevant and innovative ideas to write them up and submit them to JUNE. It was a successful strategy, and one that we continue to use. However, it is most encouraging that we now are receiving a steady flow of submissions, and I expect that many of the outstanding presentations given at the Macalester Workshop will find its way to the pages of JUNE in the near future—whether it be via a special issue for the Workshop—as suggested by Bruce Johnson—or a part of the steady stream of submissions that were prompted by the positive responses they received at this year’s event. For those of us who have been around at the inception of FUN and JUNE, it was particularly heartening at this year’s Workshop to observe the generation of new ideas and energy—despite the conspicuous absence of the enthusiasm fostered by our founding father and initial workshop organizer, Julio Ramirez. Although we missed Julio, and although it was great to see familiar friends, it was particularly inspiring to see so many new and young faces at this year’s Workshop—a sure sign that FUN and JUNE have strong futures ahead. Finally, I must thank Eric Wiertelak (the FDR of FUN), his colleagues, and students at Macalester, for organizing another magnificent Workshop at Macalester College. It is the dedication of people like Eric that ensures that FUN and JUNE will not only adequately face the many challenges ahead, but will be able to change in ways that will always make us better.