About me
My name is Peter Gorsuch, and I work on all Gorsuch Scientific submissions. I’m a British native, but I work from Fort Collins, Colorado, where I moved with my family in 2021.
My editing career began in 2010. Although I had a PhD in plant biology and three first-author publications to my name, it’s fair to say that Nature was taking a chance on me when I was recruited as a research editor! The learning curve was precipitous, but soon I was making informed decisions using Nature’s editorial criteria – I was looking out for novel findings that seemed to be both a breakthrough for the field and interesting to other fields. I had the privilege of working with the authors of some of the most exciting work out there.
At Nature, I came to a realization: when an editor makes a decision, they notice a huge range of the paper’s strengths and weaknesses that aren’t passed on to the authors, especially in the case of rejected papers. These insights would greatly benefit readers, peer reviewers, other editors, and above all, the authors. I wanted to bring that level of expert editorial support to authors directly.
My answer was to run a research editing and advice service: Scientific Editing, at Nature Research Editing Service, which I molded and led for nearly 12 years. As Chief Editor and Product Manager, I set up processes, systems, and policies, managed an editorial team and wider global pool of specialized experts, and performed a lot of editing myself.
All the while, I shared what I learned from both of those roles to researchers around the world as a key contributor to Nature Masterclasses.
Most recently, I worked as a linguist working on scientific manuscripts. In this unique position, I analyzed the building blocks of research papers and established the workings of a new online writing tool. I also explored the use of generative AI and led a prompt engineering group using GPT to generate scientific text.
Alongside my freelance work, I’m something of a Colorado cliché as I love to get out into the mountains and to work on my house and garden (and family!).
Why work with me?
There are very few people with my depth and breadth of expertise in helping scientific authors express their ideas – I’ve developed large-scale services and tools, developed and delivered training and consultations both online and in-person, and above all, I’ve done a hell of a lot of editing!
I’ve developed >1000 documents across the sciences, mostly research manuscripts of all types, but also grant applications, qualitative reviews, systematic reviews, opinion pieces, and public outreach documents (particularly UK REF impact case studies). I’ve worked on the gamut of research types from randomized controlled trials, to single-cell sequencing studies, to reviews of ocean circulation models, to device prototypes. This range is the secret to my success – I have the ability to interrogate scientific ideas across topics and tease out the means to make a real difference.
I’ve delivered scores of manuscript consultations, working in a team with the authors to figure out the key writing issues, discuss publishing strategy, and draw up next steps to maximize the chances of success. Sometimes I was sitting with the researchers at their institution, sometimes we met online.
And I’ve trained thousands of researchers in writing and publishing in person across five continents as part of Nature Masterclasses. I developed some of the training content, including as a member of the four-person expert panel on both their flagship manuscript writing course and their grant application writing course, and at one point I was granted sole responsibility for face-to-face training content.
I can work on technical documents in almost any scientific topic, particularly:
biological sciences
medicine, including basic, translational, clinical, and healthcare studies
earth sciences, environmental sciences, and ecology
materials science
Numerous papers I’ve worked on have eventually been published in Nature, other field-leading Nature research and reviews journals, and top journals at other publishers, such as Science Translational Medicine, Geophysical Research Letters, and Advanced Materials.
I would love yours to be the next!
