connecting you with information, support and your community Yvonne Budden Scholarly Communications Manager, University of Warwick, UK Planning your Publication Strategy: The Essentials

connecting you with information, support and your community What is your research about?

connecting you with information, support and your community WHY PUBLISH?

connecting you with information, support and your community Why Publish – Some Deciding Factors Career advancement Maximise the dissemination to target audience Requirements of research assessment Departmental/institutional guidelines Research funder requirements Timeliness Pressure from co authors/collaborators

connecting you with information, support and your community WHY HAVE A PUBLICATION STRATEGY?

connecting you with information, support and your community More and more research! World average growth in volume of articles published since 2006: 4% per year. 2012: over 2.1 million articles were published. UK share of the world’s top 1% of most highly cited papers 15.9% in 2012, 2nd only to the US. In 2012 UK overtook the US to rank 1st by field-weighted citation impact SOURCE: International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base Report prepared by Elsevier for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

connecting you with information, support and your community UK research context 'UK researchers produce just over 6% of the peer reviewed papers published each year' 250,000 researchers in the UK: 6m researchers world-wide, growing fast “The rise in the no. of articles published by UK authors has not been as fast as in the very high-growth countries such as India and Brazil…” “UK researchers’ rate of productivity is more than 50% above the world average.” “citations to UK articles increased between 2006 and 2010 by 7.2% a year, faster than the world average of 6.3%” “..part of the explanation for the UK’s success is that it attracts internationally- mobile researchers. UK researchers are also more likely than those in almost any other major research nation to collaborate with colleagues overseas: almost half (46%) of the articles published by UK authors in 2010 included a non-UK author.” Source – The Finch Report (2012)

connecting you with information, support and your community UK Researchers Publishing Practices – 2003 and 2008 Research Information Network (2009), Communicating Knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings, RIN

connecting you with information, support and your community Types of publishing and dissemination channels (listed in order of importance, as rated by researchers in RIN survey) 1.Peer reviewed journals 2.Conference presentations 3.Posters 4.Monographs 5.Book chapters 6.Professional journals 7.Open access repository 8.Reports 9.Datasets 10.Working papers 11.Creative works (including exhibitions & performances) 12.Internet blog/forum

connecting you with information, support and your community ELEMENTS OF A PUBLICATION STRATEGY

connecting you with information, support and your community Consider your audience WHO are you trying to reach? – Fellow scholars? Scholars in a different discipline? Industry? Public? Practitioners and/or Educators? Would you reach all of them in the same way?

connecting you with information, support and your community Where are your audience? What types of publications are they reading? – Journals? Magazines? Trade Press? Books? Blogs? How will you approach each format? Also consider how you need to write for each different type of publication

connecting you with information, support and your community What and When are you publishing? How are you planning on dividing your work – Would a series of short articles be better than one long one? – Article(s) vs book? How long will it take to publish?

connecting you with information, support and your community What else might you need to consider? Are you planning to publish for Public Engagement? Are you publishing as part of larger ‘impact’ strategy? Is your article interdisciplinary? – If so are you aiming it a particular discipline or both or neither? Do you have any open access requirements?

connecting you with information, support and your community What is Open Access (OA)? ‘The practice of providing unrestricted access to research outputs – free and permanent online access’ Current OA policies mainly focus on journal articles and conference proceedings Publishing via Open Access means anyone can read and download the research… – As well as possibly re-use it for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

connecting you with information, support and your community Open Access Policies Research funders now mandating open access Policies in place for: – Research Councils UK – Wellcome Trust and other charities – HEFCE in relation to the next REF process

connecting you with information, support and your community

Predatory Publishers Often ‘cold-call’ by s designed to flatter the author Offer enticing benefits to authors – Royalties, quick publication, retain your copyright – And often follow through with this (!) Publishing with them can restrict your ability to further publish the work elsewhere

connecting you with information, support and your community Ways to protect yourself Check the list of publishers and journals: – – Look for details of the process – Peer-review? Editors? Plagiarism checking? Copyediting? Journal listed in DOAJ? - Talk to colleagues – have they heard of the journal or publisher?

connecting you with information, support and your community DEALING WITH THE PUBLICATION PROCESS

connecting you with information, support and your community Collaboration and co-authorship If you’re collaborating with industry: – Is publication good for them? – What is the goal of the collaboration? Is your collaboration interdisciplinary? – Can you balance the different practices and still meet your goals? Is it more important to build a research partnership or a publication strategy?!

connecting you with information, support and your community Once you have your collaboration… Agree on what to publish & where Agree on percentage contributions/word counts and deadlines – Try to balance the skills and knowledge of the team Acknowledging contributions – Balance the variety of practices across the group Negotiation skills needed on details This process will take longer than you think!

connecting you with information, support and your community Vancouver protocols for co- authorship Authorship credit should be based on all of these: 1.Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis of and interpretation of data; 2.Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3.Final approval of the version to be published.

connecting you with information, support and your community Resilience, rejection and review times! Rejection is regular, in academic publishing: prepare for it Accept reviewers’ comments and be prepared to re-work your article The ‘higher ranked’ the journal, the more likely you are to be rejected

connecting you with information, support and your community Peer Review (aka Refereeing) processes Open: both authors and reviewers know each other. Blind: author doesn’t know reviewer. Double blind: neither author nor reviewer known to each other. (Often difficult to hide author/institution!) – Nature use blind peer review Peer review is used in other contexts than journal publication – For example often grant applications are peer reviewed Number of reviewers per article? May disagree. Editor final decision?

connecting you with information, support and your community Outcomes for peer review Outcomes: – to unconditionally accept the manuscript or proposal, – to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways, – to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission, – to reject it outright. When responding to reviewers: 1.respond completely; 2.respond politely; and 3.respond with evidence.

connecting you with information, support and your community Rejection & persistence! Journal rejection rates are high… they may be explained on journal home page – but often are not Some are over 90% “Rejection rate” depends on what they consider to be a rejection Vary with discipline and speed of publication may be a factor Better to get a swift rejection! Nos. of articles submitted are increasing… PLoS ONE about 30% BUT this is not a probability rate: You can influence your chances!

connecting you with information, support and your community AFTER PUBLICATION: PROMOTING YOUR WORK & RAISING YOUR PROFILE

connecting you with information, support and your community Pitch your research in 3 minutes!

connecting you with information, support and your community Or even only 60 seconds…

connecting you with information, support and your community Publicity tactics for your Publications! 1.Send copies to key journals/influential bloggers, for them to review 2.Put your work into Open Access repositories like WRAP 3.Put references and links for your publications onto a webpage or profile hosting sites 4.Links boost Google Juice! 5.Network to find researchers with interest in your work – real world & online: follow others on Twitter 6.Blog and/or tweet about your publications: Maintain your blog and/or Twitter feed & gain readership

connecting you with information, support and your community Profile raising generally Attend conferences & seminars Give conference papers Write reviews – book reviews, review papers, online recommendations, comment on others blogs By Witzel (L.A.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

connecting you with information, support and your community Networking tips Which network “hubs” do you belong to/experts you know? Prioritise your effort Aim for lots of contacts, they don’t have to know you well – talk to people! Looser connections could be the most useful: they aren’t likely to be competing with you and are likely to value your expertise more Lots of people who can help you a bit is better than a few who can help you a lot!

connecting you with information, support and your community Thank you for listening! Any questions? Yvonne Budden Scholarly Communications Manager