Professor Kelvin Davies of the Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California, published- along with Andrew Pickering, Alison Koop, Cheryl Teoh, Gennady Ermak, and Tilman Grune- a paper  in the BJ Cell Knowledge Environment which proved to be the best-cited paper in this category of articles contributing to the Biochemical Journal’s latest Impact Factor of 4.654. (Continue Reading…)

AP News interviews the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology’s Elizabeth Zelinski on a new brain-training video game.

In a preliminary study, healthy volunteers ages 60 to 85 showed gains in their ability to multitask, to stay focused on a boring activity and to keep information in mind — the kind of memory you use to remember a phone number long enough to write it down. All those powers normally decline with age, Dr. Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues noted in a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature.

The October 2013 issue of Scientific American profiles the longevity research of the USC Leonard Davis School’s Caleb “Tuck” Finch.

Minorities with life-ending diseases are less likely to enter hospice care than whites, but palliative care consultation may be an effective strategy to address this ethnic disparity, new research by Susan Enguídanos of the USC Leonard Davis School suggested.

The New York Times featured USC Leonard Davis School professor Jon Pynoos in a story on living arrangements and options for older adults.

Kelvin Davies streamlined the submission process for one journal – now Elsevier is expanding Your Paper, Your Way across its entire portfolio.

In scholarly publishing as in life, the most complicated thing might be figuring out how to simplify. For two years, professor Kelvin Davies has quietly been revolutionizing how papers are submitted to academic journals, leaving scientists with more time to devote to actually conducting research.

The Vice Dean and James E. Birren Chair in Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and Professor of Molecular and Computational Biology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Davies has been Editor-in-Chief of biomedical journal Free Radical Biology & Medicine for more than three decades, in which time he’s seen thousands of submissions from researchers. Davies has also been editor of three other biomedical journals and on the editorial board member for dozens of others.

Like most top scholarly journals, the acceptance rates at Free Radical Biology & Medicine are brutal: only about one-in-five submitted papers are published, and most are declined right away after a quick glance, the “desk reject” in publishing parlance.

But the journal still demanded a lot of specific formatting in advance of submission – “busywork” that Davies says had nothing to do with the content of the paper and that the editors of the journal spent a lot of time correcting. Authors would toil at formatting an article to a journal’s specifications, only to have to reformat it again if the paper was rejected for resubmission to another publication.

“We’re all scientists. We’ve all felt the frustration as authors of spending an awful lot of time on something that has nothing to do with the science,” said “Sir” Kelvin, who was knighted by the President of France in 2012, in honor of his critical role in uncovering the effects of free radicals and oxidative stress on aging processes [link: http://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/1170/usc-professors-cadenas-and-davies-knighted-by-france/].

In 2011, Davies began offering researchers the option of submitting their papers to Free Radical Biology & Medicine with whatever formatting made the most sense to them, so long as they included such crucial information as a title and abstract, methods, results and discussion, references and mandatory disclosures. Free Radical Biology & Medicine is the official journal of both the Society for Free Radical Biology & Medicine, based in the United States, and the European Society for Free Radical Research.

“From the beginning, when we took off our editor caps and put on our author caps, we thought this would be great, and we rather had the idea that other authors would think it was super as well,” Davies said.

The Your Paper, Your Way system devised by Davies, which also includes a more automated citation style, was then expanded to a trial group of 42 journals by Elsevier, the publisher of Free Radical Biology & Medicine and other leading journals such as Cell and The Lancet. The feedback, in an area of publishing traditionally resistant to change, was overwhelmingly positive: not a single piece of negative feedback from authors or reviewers. Most editors said they saw no difference in their workload.

Last month, Elsevier announced an expansion of the Your Paper, Your Way system to 800 of its publications, and by the end of the year it plans to roll out the program across their entire portfolio of 2,300 journals, freeing researchers to spend time on content instead of formatting, before the certainty of acceptance. Once the paper makes it to revision stage, authors are then asked to format for consistency.

“We should be focusing on the quality of science and not the format,” Davies said. “An easier submission process not only saves time and effort but may also allow authors to achieve faster publication speeds. There is no downside to it.”