Practicalities of publishing

Transcription

1 Practicalities of publishing Matt Jenkins Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle 5 th June 2015 ORCID ID So, before I was doing this, I spent 6 or so years working for Wiley-Blackwell as a Production Editor in their Humanities and Social Science Journals department. I can't tell you what editors are looking for, or how to get yourself published (hopefully Noel will have told you that), but I can tell you something about how journals work from the inside and some practical pointers on getting your article published with the minimum of hassle.

2 Picking a journal to publish in Things to think about: - What audience do you want? - What sort of thing do you want to say? - Do you need CV-points? Things to do: - Some research into the journal and, when you've decided where to publish: - READ THE AUTHOR GUIDELINES Hopefully Noel will have covered most of this, but a few pointers might be helpful: - Who do you want to read the article? Are you talking to specialists in your subfield (and how specialist Developing Areas in general, or scholars of particular regions?) or a general audience? - What sort of article are you writing? Are you contributing to a methods literature, is this a review, is this new research, is this an intervention?various journals do short-form articles of various kinds (Area, for instance, is entirely short articles and is very supportive of early career researchers; The Geographical Journal and various others do 'Commentary' style pieces which are short interventions shop around). - Are you looking for the big name journal for the CV and the job applications? If so, what is going to get you CV points? All of this requires research. It's like when you go for a job check the journal's website, check back issues. Think about this as you're writing the article you'll have more chance of getting published if your article fits the journal. Also think about whether there are any articles in the journal which you'd like to cite. This both gives an indication of whether or not the journal is talking to the same audience you're talking to, but also helps with that question of fit (I knew an editor who was suspicious of articles which didn't cite the journal they were submitted to they saw it as a sign that the article was aimed at a different audience). And the main point of the slide is to read the author guidelines on the website or in the back of the journal. As a bare minimum, don't go over the word-count it's not A-Level, they won't allow you another 10%, THEY WILL REJECT YOU LIKE THE TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING YOU ARE. Also check the requirements for images, tables, heading levels before you start you don't want to end up rewriting because you've relied on a colour image and the journal don't print in colour/charge for printing in colour.

3 The life of a prospective journal article Submission Editorial office Desk reject Peer review Decline Revise and resubmit Accept with corrections Corrections Accept To recap what Noel's said/introduce the pre-submission life-cycle of the journal: You submit an article to a journal. Normally you'll do this through an 'electronic editorial office' an online system. That will hold your article while it gets pinged around the journal's physical editorial office, peer reviewers and the editors and they come to a decision on accepting it. They'll normally ask you to make corrections in response to comments from peer reviewers and, once you've done that, they'll press a button and it'll spit the article out to me. At this point, you'll often end up on a new tracking system, receiving s telling you who (copyeditor, typsetter, printer) now has your article.

4 Geographies of Journal Production Copyediting 2. Typesetting 3. Proofing 4. Author Correction 5. Typesetter Correction 6. Printing So, this is the world of publishing as it looked when I left it to take up my PhD. We'll assume that you submitted to a British journal, and you've been through peer review and been accepted. Well done. Your article then came in to me, in Oxford. Oxford is still the centre of UK academic publishing there are something like 30 publishers based in the city, and most major publishers with other offices have shut them down (eg Edinburgh for Wiley-Blackwell). I'd log the article into our tracking system and send it out to a copyeditor. A copyeditor is a highly skilled individual who checks the language, to make sure the article makes sense, and checks the completeness of the manuscript (have you included all your references). A lot of people think they can copyedit, most can't; it's a very difficult job. Most copyeditors are self-employed, badly paid, and taken for granted by publishing companies who don't appreciate them. Once the copyeditor had gone through the text, noting any oddities, it would go via me to the typesetter, most of whom are based in India, Malaysia and Singapore. They would take the manuscript, which is normally in Word format, and put it into the journal's layout. They would produce a PDF which would go to you, the author, to check. Normally you'll be sent a link to download the file, sometimes it will be ed to you. You then go through the text, making sure no errors have been added and responding to any questions raised by the copyeditor (like about missing references or unclear sentences). At this point, it is too late to make substantive changes, so you wouldn't. That would then go back to the typesetter to implement the changes. I'd then check the revised proof to make sure it made all the changes you requested. If it didn't, the typesetter and I would ping-pong the paper between us until it did. Once I was happy with it, it would go to the printers, most of whom were based in India (although there were also some in Singapore and a few hold-outs in the UK. From there the journal would be mailed to its subscribers, most of whom will be in the US and UK.

5 Geographies of Journal Production Copyediting 2. Typesetting 3. Proofing 4. Author Correction 5. Typesetter Correction 6. Printing That's something of a historical geography. As recently as 30 years ago, those multiple roles would appear largely under one roof the learned society would look after every aspect of the journal bar the printing. We can see in the image above a fragmented system, built around a division of labour. Increasingly, the roles are being concentrated again, but this time under the typesetter. My role, for instance, was initially farmed out to employees of the publisher in countries with cheaper labour costs (Singapore again), and is now increasingly being passed on to the typesetter (who is thus checking the quality of their own work). Typesetters are now replacing freelance copyeditors, although they are offering a very stripped-down copyediting service (largely restricted to consistency checks). Interesting to note, seeing as we're at a DARG event, the patterns of outsourcing shifting as the capitalisation of the industry increases. (It's worth noting here the critiques of academic publishing as a price-gouging monopoly The Economist is on record as describing the industry as "too odious to survive", that comment on the back of Elsevier's 33% profit margin. Possibly also worth noting the airmiles of the hard-copy journal as it leaves Singapore or India for the UK and US. Online journals, which exist on massive dataservers mainly in the US or at sea, have their own ecological problems, but they're probably less disastrous than shipping that weight of paper around.) I mention that because it has implications for the process. For one, it's harder than it used to be to find someone friendly to ask questions about the process, meaning it's good to do your homework in advance. For another, don't expect anyone to fix your errant English for you it's worth getting someone else to read over your work if you're worried about the grammar, there will be no professional coming in to sort it out for you. (This is in the sense that grammar checks are no longer conducted, not that foreign copyeditors are somehow incapable of editing English. They are more than capable, but the money for them to do it is no longer there.)

6 Preparing a manuscript for production Any manuscript you submit should be: 1. Complete 2. Not breaching copyright 3. Not breaching ethical guidelines So, with all of that in mind, how should you prepare your article to make sure it gets through production with as little hassle as possible? I'm going to talk about 3 things: completeness, copyright and ethics. You can think of them as the 'three cs', because a lower-case 'e' is essentially just a fancy 'c'. Ideally, you need to get these right BEFORE YOU SUBMIT TO THE JOURNAL. Certainly, once you've got to the stage where the journal has accepted you, you're unlikely to get a chance to make any adjustments before your article enters production, and that's the point where things will start holding you up.

7 The three c's: Completeness Does your submission include everything it said it would? Sections Images Tables Appendices References Footnotes The first 'c' is the easiest, and also the one you're most likely to get wrong. Basically, don't forget to include everything you said you were going to include. The things most likely to go wrong here are: - When you submitted, you missed off your abstract, or acknowledgements, or some other section which isn't part of the main body of the article. - You've revised your manuscript so many times the figure numbering has changed and the version in the text no longer lines up with the version that you've submitted with the manuscript. - A peer reviewer told you to take something out (or add something in) and you didn't adjust the text accordingly. - You've lost track of your references. With references, I can't recommend referencing software highly enough. If you're not already using Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley or similar, visit your uni library and see if they're running training courses on it. They are well worth it. Endnote has enough reference styles that it's likely you'll be able to correctly format your reference section without much hassle. (Although, remember to reformat if you get rejected from one journal and resubmit to another. It is sometimes possible to identify where you submitted based on the style of your references, and it doesn't look good.) Using citation software will ensure that your references match up with the citations you make in text. Don't forget to then check that your references themselves are complete the one that always used to trip people up was webpages, which need an accessed date as well as a publication date. For articles published online but not yet assigned to an issue, use their 'DOI' or 'digital object identifier' that will appear on the first page of the article, or will be clearly indicated on the web version. If you miss on, and you will, you'll get a page like this attached to your proofs. This is a set of queries raised by the copyeditor, the numbers correspond to markers in the margin of the proof next to where the error appears. When copyediting was a full job, you'd see queries about sentence meaning here, now it's largely automated so you'll predominately see queries about missing references (and about image resolution, which we'll come back to).

8 The three c's: Copyright As part of your submission process, or sometimes immediately after the article goes to the publisher, you will need to sign a form which confirms that copyright is your problem, not the publisher's. In principle, this means it is you that will be sued for any legal breach. ALLOWED NOT ALLOWED WITHOUT PERMISSION - Extracts of up to 300 words from a book - Pretty much anything else - Extracts of up to 50 words from a newspaper or journal article - Ideas or facts expressed in your own way (i.e., not directly quoted) these only need a citation See %20for%20authors%20pdf.pdf The second 'c' sounds more threatening than it is you will be made to sign a form at some point which says you confirm that you aren't breaching copyright and that you'll carry the can if you are. However, in the event of you breaking copyright, it's the publisher I'll sue, because they have money and you don't. So, in the event that it looks likely you're breaching copyright, they'll just refuse to publish you. The only thing I would recommend you avoid completely are extracts from music, poetry and literature published in the last century or so. Copyright in the UK is for 70 years from the death of the artist, and it is very difficult to get these sources through under 'fair dealing' exemptions. Be careful with photos when putting these in your manuscript, always add a line specifying the source. If it's you, it should be 'Source: Author', or similar. If you didn't take it yourself, you'll either need explicit permission or evidence that it's in the public domain (like it has a Creative Commons agreement) Be doubly careful with artwork you'll need the permission of both the painter and the photographer. As most famous artwork is privately held, this normally means getting permission from the gallery. They will supply the photo, and we'll talk about the requirements for it later. Also be careful with architecture or public artwork it only counts as public if you have continual access to it. So if you go to the Trafford Centre and photograph their fountain, you will probably need permission, whereas you wouldn't if you took ones of the fountains in Piccadilly Gardens. Also adverts. Even photos of adverts. They're trademarked, they're a world of hassle. As a final word of warning, just because you found the image on Wikipedia and it said it had a Creative Commons licence, it doesn't mean it's public domain. Particularly not if it's a famous work of art. It's probable in that case that it's the original uploader who is breaking the law (and also you, when you break the law by publishing the image).

9 The three c's: Ethics Don't be bad. The final 'c' is a hurdle you will probably have passed by the time you've been accepted most peer reviewers will raise issue with you if your research has been ethically unsound. There are two things which might slip you up here. One is related to completeness in the unlikely event of issuing dosage information, make sure you have your dosages right. Related to this, don't claim cures you don't have, especially if it's a cure for cancer, as that would be breaching the Cancer Act of 1939 and they will fine you it. The other main one is photos of people. You will have got permission from your participants to take photos of them, YOU WILL NEED FURTHER PERMISSION TO USE THOSE PHOTOS. Otherwise the publisher will need to blur their faces out. I remember two major incidents for this, one where someone had been taking photos of passers-by in the street, so didn't even have permission to have their photos, but needed their eyes to be visible to show the nature of their interaction with him we ended up with a load of grey blurs with arrows pointing out of their 'faces', like some dodgy 60s sci-fi artwork; and one where the author had given children cameras and wanted to publish the family photos they'd taken. We just had to say no to that.

10 Images - Bitmaps (.bmp,.gif,.jpg) are like pointilist pictures. The higher the 'dots per inch' (dpi) ratio, the more dots there are and so the sharper the image. The ideal bitmap had 300dpi (or 600dpi if it has text) and is about the size it will be reproduced. - Rasta (.svg) are like co-ordinate systems. They are ideal for line images (including those with text) and don't worry about dpi. When saving or exporting images, go for.jpgs for tonal images and.svgs for line images. Never go for PDF. Images are also always a faff. The first you'll know if you have a problem is a cryptic query attached to your proofs aying the images aren't great. Basically, there are two types of image bitmaps and rasta. The first is the sort of thing your camera takes, and it is a pointilist set-up: there are pixels of one colour, you cram a load of them together and your visual system interprets it in terms of a picture. Like a pointilist painting, if you get up close, OR INCREASE THE SIZE OF THE PICTURE, you can see the dots. Also, the less dots you have, the vaguer the image will be. So, to reduce blur you need more dots per inch than less; to reduce pixelation you need to make sure the image isn't too stretched basically that you provide an image which is about the size it will be printed at. Rasta images work like co-ordinate systems they contain information about where lines start and end and redraws the image every time you open it or resize it. This means they don't blur or pixellate, but also that they can't really deal with images which aren't entirlely made of lines. So, anything with tone in it (rather than mere blocks of colour), needs to be a bitmap. The best format for those is.jpg, because they're smallest in terms of file size. They should have a minimum of 300dpi, or 600dpi if they include text. They should be approximately the right size for printing, or larger. Anything which is lines only can be a rasta file the best format for those are.svgs. You don't need to worry about dpi for those. Most things you download off websites will be 96dpi. This isn't ideal, but if that's the best you can do, that's the best you can do. Every now and again, although not all that often, a publisher will refuse to print an image because the quality is too poor. That's not ideal, but neither was your image.

11 Mongraphs The publication process is essentially the same as journals, except you're more likely to get language copyediting. There are two main ways of getting a monograph published: - Submit a proposal through an established series (such as the RGS-IBG book series, or those run by the journals Antipode or the Bulletin of Latin American Studies) - Submit a proposal direct to a publisher. Details will differ across publishers and will be available on their website. Try schmoosing with publishing editors at conferences go to the publisher booths/tables and talk to them about how awesome your work is. You're more likely to make progress that way. I'm not actually much of an expert on book publishing I used to play cricket with people who worked in books and, by and large, they seemed like quite nice people. Fortunately, there's very little that's radically different from a publishing point of view. The poor person at the publisher will have to get CIP data from the Library of Congress, which is a nightmare of procedural bureaucracy for precious little reward, but you won't notice much different. Thus what I've said up until this point is still true.

12 Promoting your articles IMPACT! CV POINTS! KILL ME NOW! Future Matt do something about this slide. Say something clever about alternative article metrics and how no one will ever read their blog. So I'm skeptical/not-skeptical about all the ceaseless self-promotion we're meant to be doing. On one side, it is a further exploitation and degradation of capital, disciplining us to be atomised vendors of a tired product which is ourselves; on the other we're here to expand knowledge and you do that as much by spreading it out as by building it up. To make this a positive slide outreach. Over the last few months, I've explained my research to children using picture books (I study statistics), I've done drama workshops on my research with a load of biomedical scientists (I study statistics) and I've written to members of the public leading them through my research in a series of self-guided created activities (I study statistics). I got more out of that than I would have from blogging. Some journals offer options for promoting your articles on their blog, through their Twitter, with videos, with other things. Take these up they're a relatively low-effort way of reaching large established audiences. Guest-blogging on sites with existing audiences is a better way of getting readers than having your own blog, which can take a lot of effort to maintain, is often a little sparse and not of the best quality, distracts you from actually doing your own research, and is read by your mother and friends and no one else. (Other views on blogs are probably available, if you know an evangelist for self-promotion, ask them for some balance.) Some publishers offer 'alternative article metrics' information on how often your article has been shared on social media. These are meaningless, but not much less meaningless than the standard citation indices, so be aware of them they may be good on your CV. Also think about having an online repository. I use Figshare to hold all my published outputs (*the versions which I'm allowed to publish, which is normally the pre-peer review version and not the final version) and conference papers. This will be going up there. It can be a good way of building up a portfolio and showing the development of your ideas.

13 References This is where the references go. Or would be, if I'd cited anyone and not just talked off the top of my head for half an hour. It's a skill they can't teach you it. There are no references. It all came from my head. Incidentally, the source line for that would read: Source: Author.