-: Let's move to the next part of the workshop
and talk about strategies
for selecting journals for submission.
Okay, so one easy way to do this
is when you go back to your office or desk,
just gather up the articles, five or 10 articles
that are most important to your current project
and just flip to the back
to the references cited in these articles
and make a tally of which journals
are being cited in those articles,
so if you see three or four journals being cited
over and over and over again,
that gives you some important clues
that those are the predominant journals for your topic.
So, that's an easy way to start zeroing in
on where you want to publish.
Once you have this list of potential target journals,
you can go to their website and browse
the recent issues of these journals,
look at three or four recent issues
and just go through most or all of the papers
that are published in those issues
and see what types of papers they are publishing
and you can also see the speed of publication,
so you can look at when the paper
was submitted and when it was published
and you can see some journals are faster.
Some journals are more slow
and that's information that you can use.
Also, when you have your potential target list of journals,
you should go and read the aims and scope,
so this is where the publisher tells you
what they want to publish.
They tell you what types of papers they want.
They tell you the target audience they want.
They tell you the topics that they're interested in.
For example, some journals will take review articles
or methods articles or short papers.
Some only take full original research papers,
so you just need to know what types of papers they take
and the appropriate research topics,
so that's all found in the aim and scope.
So, this is the home page of a journal in my field.
This is the Journal of Experimental Botany
and this is just a web capture screenshot
and down here you see instructions to authors.
Okay, so that's what I'm talking about.
If you click instructions to authors,
that will give you the aims and scope
and all of their instructions.
So, after clicking instructions to authors,
you'll get a page like this
and this goes on for a long ways.
I'm not going to show all of it to you,
but the first thing they talk about is the scope,
so the aim of JXB is to publish
the highest quality manuscripts that address
questions of broad interest in plant biology.
Then they go on to give you a lot more information
about the types of articles they want.
So, take a look at this and think.
Does my article fit
into the aims and scope for this journal?
Okay, so once you've gathered that information,
there's other information that you'll want to use also,
so the aspects that you consider
when choosing your target journal.
I've already mentioned the type of article,
a review, a methods, a short paper,
whatever the case may be.
Think about the target audience,
so each journal has a target audience.
Some of the journals have the same target audience.
Some of them overlap partially, but not entirely,
so think about the readers
that you're trying to reach with your paper.
The type of papers, in terms of methodology and approach.
The time from submission to publication.
Okay, so this is important information.
So, maybe you need it published as quickly as possible,
so that could help you decide.
Or maybe you're not in as big of a hurry,
but you want it in that specific journal that takes longer.
Each situation is different,
so that's something to consider.
Is this a rapid journal
or is this one that takes a longer time?
One that you've probably heard about
is the impact factor or other metric for the journal,
so this is also something to consider,
so let's talk about this in more detail.
Impact factor and other metrics.
So, the impact factor.
Okay, this is all directly from the website Thomson Reuters.
These are the publishers that determine impact factor.
They index journals in all different disciplines
and then they keep track of how much each article is cited
and then they tally all this together
to create an impact factor.
Another consideration to take in mind
is whether you're going to publish open access or not,
so the cost to publish.
Do I want to spend money to publish this paper or not?
So, what is open access?
Let's talk about that briefly.
So, publishing in journals,
there are a few different models now.
We have the traditional model.
This is where the author does not pay
the journal to publish the paper.
You submit the paper.
They accept it, they publish it,
but only subscribers of that journal can access the article,
so the exposure of the article is limited to subscribers.
There's a second model called the gold open access model
and so in the gold open access model,
the author has to pay the journal,
so you have to pay to have your paper published,
but then the journal makes the published article
available to anyone for free.
You don't have to have a subscription,
so you're basically paying the subscription for the readers
by going with the gold open access
or any form of open access.
There's also the hybrid model,
so these are journals where you can publish it for free,
but not make your article open access
or you can pay and your article will be open access.
So, you kind of need to decide before you submit
do I want to pay or do I not?
The journal will supply information for the cost to publish
if it's open access or the hybrid model,
so that will be in the instructions for authors.
So, sometimes you have money built into the project
to pay for open access, sometimes you don't,
so that's a consideration.
Now speaking of open access, you need to be careful
when you're choosing an open access journal
because now there are a lot of basically fake journals
and there are a lot of these fake journals.
Every day I get invitations to publish
in these fake journals in my email
and so what you should do is go to this website,
scholarlyoa.com, or Scholarly Open Access,
and look at Beall's list.
So, Jeffrey Beall is a librarian in Colorado
who's put together this list and he updates it every year
of potential, possible, or probable
predatory scholarly open access publishers,
so these are publishers
that basically will publish anything.
It doesn't matter how bad it is.
As long as you pay, they'll publish it
and if you publish in these journals,
it's not going to be considered valid in your field.
It's going to hurt you more
as an academic than it will help you.
So, how many of these are there?
So, in 2011, there were 18 publishers
and you can see the numbers.
At the beginning of 2015, there were 693,
so there's a lot of them out there
and these are publishers, so they have multiple journals.
There are also standalone journals
and at the beginning of the year, there were 507 of those,
so there's thousands of these
predatory journals that you want to avoid,
so it's kind of like the wild west of publishing now
and you have to really be careful
and go with known journals.
Okay, so with your discussion partners,
let's just take a couple minutes
and based on all of these factors we've talked about,
for the next project that you will publish,
what are your top two criteria
for selecting a target journal?
Let's just take about two minutes.
(slow music)
Okay, so what did you come up with?
What were your top criteria for choosing a journal?
How many had impact factor?
Yeah, okay.
The highest possible impact factor, let's put it that way.
(students chuckle)
How many had that?
Nobody?
You all changed your mind suddenly.
What did you have?
(student comments)
Okay, so let me summarize that
for the group that couldn't hear.
So, he was saying that his strategy would be
to start at the highest impact factor journal.
If it gets rejected, go down to the next one.
If it gets rejected, go down to the next one
and that's a valid strategy if you have time,
if you have time to do that,
if you want the highest possible impact factor,
but maybe you don't have time to do that
and you wanna go for a safe journal right away,
so you might choose a lower impact factor for time.
So, there's a lot to think about.
There's not a one strategy fits all situations model.
Okay.
All right, so think about your current situation.
What's important for publishing in your situation?