Scholarly publishing
Dan Scott <dscott@laurentian.ca>
Associate Librarian
2018-01-23 
Why publish?
Advancing knowledge
From a Western perspective, a noble tradition dating back to Greek philosophy
Profit (for academics)
⇑ supply, ~ demand ∴ low $$$ (for publications)
Your career may benefit, however…
Plenty of $$$ for publishers
Prestige and employability
Tenure and promotion evaluation criteria differ from university to university, faculty to faculty, and department to department
Chasing citations
- Bibliometrics
- Impact factor
- h-index
- Gamification, and being gamed
Venue: Books (science)
- Usually edited volumes: e.g. 8,500 Springer "life sciences" titles
- Editor may get a small stipend
- Chapter authors may get a discount
- Visibility may not be high
Venue: Conferences
- "Presented a paper at a conference"
- Can include full peer review
- Results collected in proceedings
- Excellent networking opportunities
- Also subject to predatory behaviour
Venue: Journals
- Peer-reviewed high-impact journals: "gold standard"
- But it's complicated
Venue: Preprint Archives
"immediate dissemination and open access to scholarly articles" (arXiv.org)
- May include commenting, open reviews, etc.
- Often a precursor to traditional journal, with benefit of early, broad feedback
- Preprints can be (and are) cited
Biology: bioRxiv
Open Science
Open science: University of Toronto researchers to publish lab notes in real time
Establishing yourself
Disambiguation
Researcher profiles
- ORCID (Open, non-profit)
- ResearcherID (Web of Science)
- Google Scholar (Google)
Researcher networks
Be careful: these entice you to upload your papers, at your legal responsibility.
Publish for good!
- Enhance human knowledge
- Advance your career
- Publish early, publish often
- Lean on your librarian
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License