3. What is Academic Publishing?
• Defined as the written word (and associated content:
figures, tables, data, survey questions, related video or
audio data), representing a deliverable / outcome from
an Academic‟s research activities
• On-line or print
• Assumes the publisher is supported, recognized and
reputable
• Assumes some kind of peer-review process
• Includes single- and multi-authored work, collaborative
work, research with students
4. Why care about Academic
Publishing?
• Publications remain a key metric by which University
Academics are judged:
• Tenure and promotion
• Grant success
• Publications lead to opportunities:
• Attracting students
• Initiating collaborations within and among institutions
• New research directions
• Publications are one form of outreach:
• A deliverable from publically-funded research
• Our institutions rely on publications for recruitment and for
financial support
• Publications form the basis of the research-teaching-nexus
• Current results from research need to inform content in lectures
6. My list:
• Lack of time to write and publish
• Open access / Paywalls
• costs to publish
• Length of time for the process
• Difficulty in getting work published
• High rejection rates
• Reviewer and Editor fatigue
• Journal choice:
• Too much choice!
• Predatory publishers
• Skill development (writing, formatting, etc)
12. Strategies: make time to write
• Schedule it! Block off periods of time for writing
• Deadlines: set them, stick to them.
• Use a laboratory discussion group, seminar class, journal
club, or an undergraduate class as motivators for setting
deadlines
• Take a week-long writing „vacation‟ each year
• Collaborate: use co-authorship as a strategy to write
• Make it easier by practicing more often
• Blogs, journals
14. Open Access
• OA is important to many people, and a requirement for
some research activities / countries (e.g., USA)
• It is desirable to publish in OA journals!
• OA journals, however, are not free
• In many of the Sciences, if there are no costs (i.e., author
pay, or subscriptions), be worried about quality and
sustainability
• The costs to publish can important in some disciplines
• Advice: educate yourself on the issue, do what you can.
15. The length of the process….
• Time from submission to acceptance can be
unacceptably long, and this has serious implications
• Why has it gotten so bad?
• External factors: Reviewer fatigue, editor fatigue, backlog of
papers for publishers, page limits for publisher, flood of
papers from China, India, etc
• Internal factors: Poor writing, wrong journal choice, lack of
good reviewer suggestions, wrong choice of
subject/associate editor
16. Strategies:
• Do your research (journal choice, editor choice)
• Have reasonable expectations
• Make it easy for the editorial team
• …list potential reviewers!
• Graduate students as reviewers?
• Write your work well, package your work well
• For some publishing venues, a letter to the editor is
important
• Karma: be a good citizen, be a good collaborator, and
network
17. High rejection rates / Major revisions
• It is getting more difficult to publish work in high quality
journals, despite the proliferation of journals!
• Even „minor‟ revisions are often deemed „major‟
• Editors are leaning towards rejection, seldom ask for
minor revisions
• “3rd reviewer” getting rare in some disciplines?
• There is a great deal of editor / reviewer fatigue
18. What you can do:
• Be persistent
• Do not be shy about writing rebuttals
• Be reasonable, compromising, but stick to your guns
• Aim for the correct journal or publisher
19. Picking the right Journal / Publisher
• Whether we like it or not: Tenure & Promotion
committees and search committees often look to
publishing metrics to assess quality of candidates
• Journal choice becomes important in some disciplines:
• Impact Factor
• H-Factor
22. Strategies
• Do your research
• Balance your publications between higher profile / higher
impact publication venues and more discipline-specific
publication venues
• Make your case to a tenure / promotion committee
• It is important and acceptable to publish in places that may
be seen as „low impact‟ publications
23. …from my tenure dossier:
• “I sometimes choose to publish in journals with a more
regional or national focus, even though the impact
factors may be lower. This is partly because the
research may be more relevant to a narrow geographical
area; I also believe strongly that regional journals have
an important role to play in dissemination of research
results to national or regional entomologists”
24. Predatory Publishers
• Publish in reputable places, with good copy-editors /
typesetters and in places that are supported, and
indexed
• Be wary of (some) OA journal
• Be wary of predatory publishers
• If something looks too good to be true, be worried.
25. Predatory Publishers:
• Publish papers already published in other venues/outlets
without providing appropriate credits
• Use language claiming to be a “leading publisher” even
though the publisher may only be a startup or a novice
organization.
• Operate in a Western country chiefly for the purpose of
functioning as a vanity press for scholars in a developing
country.
• Do minimal or no copyediting.
• Publish papers that are not academic
• Obvious pseudo-science.
• Have a “contact us” page that only includes a web form,
and the publisher hides or does not reveal its location
26.
27. Skill Development
• Writing is a skill
that must be
practiced
• Strategies:
• Write regularly
(every day?)
• Blogs, journals,
diaries, etc.
• Read about writing
28. Study creative ways to present data:
• E.g., Read Tufte‟s book “The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information”
30. Open peer commentary
• Consists of eliciting (and publishing) non-anonymous
commentary on a peer-reviewed "target article" from a
dozen or more specialists across disciplines, co-
published with the author's response.
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41. The value of plain-language summaries
• Research becomes accessible to a range of audiences
• High school students, journalists, colleagues, and more
• Freely available
• Develop (different) skills in writing
• Makes University relevant to the general public
• Recruitment of students, staff, donor relations
44. Decisions about publishing
• Sustainability
• You want your work to be around in perpetuity
• Are costs relevant to publishing in your discipline?
• Open-access?
• Library subscriptions?
• Access
• How important is OA to you, your co-authors, your institution,
and those who financed your research?
• Career stage
• Tenure and promotion?
• Type of research and results
• Time sensitive?
• Student research?
• That old manuscript…
