A game with unwritten rules: challenges & opportunities in academic publishing

Chris Buddle

McGill University

1. ACADEMIC PUBLISHING: AN

OVERVIEW

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

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

2. CURRENT CHALLENGES IN

ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

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)

2. STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS

Lack of time

Do an analysis of how YOU spend your

time.

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

Read about Productivity

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A proliferation of journals…

Other metrics?

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

…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”

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.

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

Skill Development

• Writing is a skill

that must be

practiced

• Strategies:

• Write regularly

(every day?)

• Blogs, journals,

diaries, etc.

• Read about writing

Study creative ways to present data:

• E.g., Read Tufte‟s book “The Visual Display of

Quantitative Information”

4. PUBLISHING INTO THE FUTURE…

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.

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

Self-publish? ….Blogs

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…