I had no idea what the benefits were behind the membership (beyond an impressive line on the CV). I am sure that many other undergraduate students also have this problem when they read faculty profiles.
Therefore, I decided to conduct a little underground investigation for The Brain Wave, so that we can figure what the big deal is behind being a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
First of all, the NAS is a non-profit and non-governmental organization established by Congress. Although the NAS does not directly fund scientific research by giving out grants, it recognizes and supports outstanding science. Most notably, NAS has an official peer-reviewed journal called the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which is well-recognized as a high-profile journal.
Becoming a member is not easy: Every single new member is elected by current members. Therefore, being an exceptional scientist is a prerequisite. Based on my interpretations, to become a member, one needs profound political connections with the big shots in the field. In other words, being a member of NAS is mad impressive.
However, the biggest benefit to being an NAS member is way more than just a cool line on the CV: NAS membership essentially guarantees at most four papers in PNAS per year. Yes, PNAS is not on the same tier as Nature, Cell or Science, but under normal circumstances it can be exceedingly difficult to get just one paper in PNAS, let alone four per year.
In the past, a NAS member can submit up to ten papers to PNAS, and the papers were published without review. Eventually, ten papers was decreased to four, and NAS decided that the papers need to be reviewed, but here is the catch: The NAS member can select the reviewers. Therefore, you can just select your friends to be reviewers and they will never say anything bad about your paper.
In essence, being an NAS member means you are set for life in terms of academic publishing. For the rest of your life, you are 99 percent guaranteed that most of your papers will be published in PNAS at the minimum (or at least getting a paper into PNAS will be significantly easier). At the first try, you can aim for Nature, Cell or Science. If your paper does not get into those, you can have PNAS as a safety.
Because of such publishing privileges, the NAS has received much criticism. If it is so easy for NAS members to publish in PNAS (with almost minimal peer-review and scrutiny), might this mean that PNAS is a repository for their sh*tty research that would not have otherwise been accepted in any other journal?
I think that this characterization of PNAS as a repository for sh*tty research may or may not be true, but there is sh*tty research being published anyway in PNAS and other high-profile journals. Sure, it might seem a bit unfair, but such is life. There are people with privileges and people without. In the end, I do not think that this argument really matters. The field ultimately judges the quality and impact of the paper, not the journal the paper was published in.
That said, next time you run into a member of NAS, you should beg him/her to let you join the lab. After all, you may end up as a co-author on a PNAS paper, which is not too shabby for an undergraduate.
