Sarah Fankhauser spent years judging middle school and high school science fairs before she realized the major disconnect.

From her seat at the judge's table, she saw students who'd spent a year or more adapting the scientific method for competition. After months of designing and tweaking experiments to test hypotheses, she saw young, budding scientific minds put their work to the test, just to have the life cycle of that work come to a halt after judging was complete.

"There were all these students doing science research, and after science fair, it was really like, 'OK, well, that's the end,'" Fankhauser says. "No one in the public would actually hear about this amazing science unless they decided to go to science fairs just for fun, which isn't what most people like to do."

A journal to close the gap

Fankhauser knew from her grad student research in microbiology at Harvard Medical School that the way most professional scientists disseminate their findings is through peer-reviewed publishing. But she couldn't find a journal that was devoted to reviewing and publishing the findings of teenage scientists.

So she decided to create one.

In 2011, Fankhauser and a team of volunteer grad students at Harvard launched Journal of Emerging Investigators, the first peer-reviewed open access journal explicitly for middle and high school students. With inagural Editors-in-Chief Lincoln Pasquina and Chris Wells installed, JEI began recruiting papers and, in January 2012, published their first article, a high schooler's investigation into how birth order affects academic success.

"One of my goals was never to reject a paper based on sophistication of the science," Fankhauser says, clarifying that papers are rejected only if there's no research basis or if plagiarism is suspected. "It's all about whether students have a good hypothesis and whether they have solid experiments to test that hypothesis."

In its five-year publication history, JEI has accepted around 300 papers, the majority of which were recruited from middle and high school science fairs. This year, they published their 100th manuscript, a benchmark that's included reports on everything from DNA degredation to the comparative absorbancy of popular diaper brands. Their shining moment came in 2014 when a 14-year-old Pittsburgh high school student published his hypothesis that a simple font change could save his school $21,000 in ink and paper costs per year. CNN, Huffington Post, and The Atlantic were among the many national news outlets that leapt on the story once the students applied the model to United States government spending, proposing a cost savings of over $400 million (though this was later refuted).

"We definitely saw an increase in submissions immediately after that," Fankhauser says. But the satisfaction of JEI isn't in grabbing headlines. JEI thrives on its mission to teach young scientists about the impact of their science outside the classroom and science fair. "We've received lots of emails from students and often parents that just expressed gratitude for the peer review process and having the opportunity to work with other scientists to improve their own science."

Building a lineage

In 2012, Mark Springel graduated from Williams College and moved to Boston to pursue his PhD in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He'd always been a hardcore proponent of increasing scientific literacy, and when he discovered Fankhauser's work with JEI, he threw his efforts into the fledgling journal.

"I wanted badly, in any way, to get involved," Springel says. "I was looking to encourage science and science communication in the community here in Boston."

Springel started his tenure at JEI as a copyeditor five years ago. At the time, Fankhauser was still with the journal, but she'd rotate out two years later after taking a postdoc position at Emory University. By design, all of the journal's reviewers and editors are volunteer grad students (though they have allowed for the odd postdoc). It's a mutual education model. JEI's forebearers wanted to give their volunteers a tangible payout—in return for their time mentoring a young scientist, grad students gain hard skills reviewing science and communicating edits diplomatically.

"It's very clear that graduate students are learning how to better critique science," Fankhauser says. "It helps them have a better sense of what it's like to be a professional scientist, since part of the job of being a PI is to mentor young students to review."

When Fankhauser moved to her current role as executive director, Rebecca Reh took over as president. Then Ilana Kelsey. Eventually, after enough graduations, it became Springel's turn. As the fourth president of JEI, Springel oversees the journal's 64-person staff, ensuring that the ever-widening pool of grad students have the opportunity to find the inspiration that's driven him to the journal's helm.

"So many students are just relentlesss; it's really amazing to see how hard they work," Springel says. "In grad school, you're working in the lab on a single thing for years, and it gets to the point where you need some sort of motivation. I derive motivation from these kids sometimes."

In July, JEI is making perhaps its biggest move under Springel's leadership. After years of using a combination of Dropbox and Google Sheets to track their submissions and publications—a system Fankhauser mirthfully describes as "completely unorganized"—JEI will migrate to Editorial Manager, a submission and peer review tracking platform used by many life science publishers, including Springer Nature, AAAS, PLOS, and Cell Press. The move will not only decrease the time and effort it takes to wrangle JEI manuscripts and increase the journal's capacity, but it will also give JEI's staff members even more practice as professional scientists.

"Part of our mission is to supply an education in science publishing to graduate students, so what better way than to adopt a manuscript submission system that is used by top journals?" Springel says of the transition. "It gives the graduate students an inside look into what science publishing is like to a greater degree than what was provided before."

Purpose in the chaos

When Jamilla Akhund-Zade joined JEI three years ago, things were drastically different.

Akhund-Zade, who is pursuing her PhD in genetics and evolutionary biology, acts as co-editor-in-chief of JEI alongside Olivia Ho-Shing and Michael Marquis, and that position gives her a boots-on-the-ground view of the ongoing changes at JEI. She's seen both submissions and editorial staff grow exponentially. She's seen children from Appleton, Wisc., to Saudi Arabia get their projects transformed into citable literature. As the de facto manager of all this chaos, she's excited to be able to give editors and authors alike the most professional experience possible while maintaining JEI as a grassroots, volunteer-driven operation.

"You can be juggling 10 manuscripts at a time that are in different stages," she says of the workload. "The number of submissions keeps going up, and there's only so much we can work our editors, especially in the summer when there's so much travel." If an editor goes out of touch, it falls on Akhund-Zade and her fellow EICs to keep the communication going. She's seen how students and mentors can lose motivation during lags in production, and she doesn't want any juvenile scientists to withdraw a submission because of an inefficiency on JEI's end. "If we can see there's a lag in assigning editors, we start giving very detailed pre-review letters for really obvious changes that we see, things that could've been put into an editor letter at a later point, to just give kids something to work on so they're not waiting there for months at a time."

Though many scientists are compelled to publish and review articles as a service to science, Akhund-Zade feels the pull even more strongly in her role at JEI. It's evident from the hours she spends on Sundays crafting precise acceptance letters and wrangling reviews from her fellow grad students. But the payoff is acutely gratifying. There's nothing like seeing a paper that's languished in revision limbo pop up on the JEI homepage and knowing that all the toil was worth it.

She speaks with an exasperated wonder when Springel brings up an infamous paper among JEI's editorial staff. The paper analyzed strategic advantage of picking white versus black pieces in chess, and it was written by a Florida seventh grader who, to Akhund-Zade, had illustrated a strong, innate understanding of the scientific method. But the paper itself needed sweeping revisions, and the student was very unfamiliar with the structure and formulation of a scientific paper.

"I thought that, at any point, this kid was gonna give up," Akhund-Zade says. "We'd just tortured him through several copyediting processes and review processes, but every time he'd respond, he'd say, 'Thank you so much for helping me out.'"

When the paper was finally published in February after 11 months of grueling edits and rehashed experiments, the feeling was an affirmiation of every hour she'd spent volleying emails with the student and his mentor.

"I knew how hard he'd worked, and I knew how much hell we'd put him and his mentor through to get him up to speed," she says, galvanized anew by the memory. "They were so happy. It was such a labor of love."