Important scientific news is published every day, and sometimes it has a major impact in a specialist field. But there is one journal that has a special place in the scientific firmament. Over the years, it has been the place where those papers that have changed the world have been published. But it is not produced by any learned society; it is a commercial magazine, run by a private company with its own editorial policies.
When an important paper appears in Nature, within hours of publication it can be network TV news around the world. That kind of visibility in the scientific world has made Nature a powerful brand, which has now moved onto the Internet. Annette Thomas's job, as managing director of the Nature Publishing Group, is to make the most from the brand commercially, while doing everything she can to protect its integrity. This means that any new launches bearing the Nature label have to have the same academic and editorial values. She has to balance that against the needs of sponsors, who themselves are looking to buy into that integrity, without selling it out to short-term commercialism.
This is a tough balance requiring commercial flair, dynamism and academic credibility, so it's just as well that Thomas has all these qualities.
Philip Campbell, editor in chief of Nature, said: 'She is very dynamic; when she sees an important goal, she really goes for it. She is very opportunistic, in the good sense that she is good at spotting opportunities. When she was relatively inexperienced she headed for some of these opportunities very fast and ended up having to pick up a few pieces on the way. She was prepared to stick her neck out.
'She will listen to all sides of an issue and then show leadership when it comes to important goals, even if there are people around who are concerned about achieving them.
'She has a very good sense of the editorial interests of publications, having been an editor and a scientist, but is absolutely committed to bottom-line targets. She instigated a lot of sponsorship arrangements, but was determined that editorial independence be maintained. She made sure the sponsors were inspired by the editorial goals, and therefore were willing to support those goals without interfering.
'Her predecessors had spotted opportunities for the brand; she has consolidated what was already in hand and also taken a number of initiatives to expand and diversify.
'I have always enjoyed working with Annette; there are times when she has the bit between her teeth on a particular goal, that she is moving faster than some of us can keep up with. But the important thing is that she will listen, and I have never had any trouble getting the editorial viewpoint heard and understood.'
Annette Thomas was born in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Her father was, by then, retired from the US Army having been one of the first black officers. Her mother was German and they met while he was serving in Germany. The racial segregation that still existed in the US at the time confused her.
Her father took a degree in pharmacy at Howard University after leaving the army, and worked as a pharmacist. He died when Annette was just eight years old.
Thomas went to Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland, which had an experimental scheme to boost science education. Thomas was interested in science, but really went for the programme because it offered the chance to get a better education than her local public school. The campus was situated between the NASA Research Center, the National Institutes for Health, and an agricultural research centre. Thomas took various jobs at research labs, which she kept until just before she graduated from college.
Thomas said: 'I got a lot of exposure to working scientists and experiments. It gave me the chance to have quite interesting jobs as quite a young person. When the rest of my friends were flipping burgers, I had what was considered a fantastic job.
'The expectations in my family were really high. At this stage, my mother was raising three of us on her own, so not doing your best just was not an option. I think about it a lot now that I have two kids of my own. How did she get us to always do our best? I just can't figure it out. There was no negative pressure to succeed, she was just very supportive.'
Thomas applied to all the Ivy League schools and was accepted by all of them. She chose Harvard, partly because they had a generous package of financial support available, although she still had to work while she studied. Her major was biochemistry and biophysics.
By this time, she had decided that life science was her major interest. She toyed with the idea of doing an MD, but it was research that always interested her, so she decided to take the PhD programme at Yale. Although she enjoyed her research experience, Thomas was looking for some way to get away from being too specialised. She was interested in such a broad range of things that she wanted a job that would expose her to a wider perspective of science.
She said: 'Obviously, as you progress as a scientist you do broaden out because you have a bigger lab and collaborations and so on. Through the eyes of a graduate student, you don't necessarily see all of that. So I thought that I wanted to do something a bit more broad.'
Thomas moved to San Diego, California, to join her husband and started applying for jobs. She responded to an advertisement for a cell biology editor at Nature, without even expecting to get an interview. The job was in London, but that was not a problem as her husband is British. She had spent a lot of time in Europe because of her family connections in Germany. She was attracted to the idea of working in London, but confesses that San Diego had plenty of attractions of its own (e.g. weather). She expected them to be looking for someone with more experience and was taken aback when they offered her a job as a manuscript editor, selecting articles to publish and preparing them for publication.
An important part of the job was to network with leading scientists in the field, to make sure that Nature was making the right decisions on what to publish. Only about 30 per cent of articles that are submitted are reviewed, and ultimately only about eight per cent are published. She found that the reputation of the journal was such that there was no problem getting advice from experts in the field.
Thomas said: 'Those scientists that give advice vary from paper to paper to paper, so it's not that Nature is always using the same people to think about these things; we will get advice from whoever is appropriate for any particular paper. This means that you reduce the risk of bias creeping in, because there is not a set editorial board. There are weaknesses to the system as well, but it's the one we use.
'I loved that job. It involved a lot of responsibility and learning about a lot of different areas of science. There was a lot of travel, visiting conferences and labs to meet people.'
Thomas rose up through the editorial hierarchy, taking on more responsibility. She launched a supplement series called Nature Insights and worked on research and development for new commercial ventures for the company. In 1998, she was offered the chance to launch and run her own magazine, Nature Cell Biology, as the company started its expansion programme for the Nature brand.
'At that point I started to realise that what I was most interested in was the creation of new publishing initiatives. I loved the launch process, the design and putting together something that would appeal to our target group. So, I started to move into the business side of the company, into publishing, and to combine the editorial with advertising, marketing, in a more complete role. We launched a new series of review journals in October 2000, so I moved from Cell Biology to be the publisher of that project. We launched six journals in a year.
'If you spoke to anyone who knew me they would say that it was not a surprising move.'
In 2000, Thomas was made managing director of Nature Publishing Group. This was a relatively new group within Macmillan, Nature's parent company, and took in its entire scientific journal, book and web publishing. As well as new launches, she has overseen the development of relationships with learned societies, publishing journals on their behalf and running their web distribution. She is determined not to allow the Nature brand to be diluted. Its reputation gives it a premier position in the scientific community, which can offer a prominent platform for other organisations, to publish their material, and footfall in its web sites, but she realises this reputation is fragile if it were ever to lose its independence or authority. She is very careful about new launches.
After 10 years, she has lost none of her enthusiasm for her work. She said: 'Virtually every day I go into the office and think how incredibly lucky I am to be working in this place with these people. They are all incredibly intelligent and highly motivated. My boss, in particular, is committed to helping people develop. He has had to spend an enormous amount of time with me. He could have taken a much easier option and appointed someone who knew all the ropes and had been around. The route he has taken means that he has had to make a large time commitment helping me to learn what I need to learn.
'I want to see the people at Nature do well; that would be my greatest achievement. That is why I find the greatest disappointments are when things don't work at a people level. Now I have two young children, I'm expecting my third baby now, and that's another commitment that I'm about to take on. Blending those commitments with my commitments at Natureure is something I could do for quite some time. There are so many things still to do.'
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