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Times They Are a Changin’ — The Altered Landscape of Technical Publishing

2018; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1752-1688.12628

1752-1688

Venkatesh Uddameri,

Open Source Software Innovations

Those of us who have published papers two or three decades ago remember the rather long hiatus (sometimes years) between the final acceptance of an article and its eventual publication in a journal. Seeing the article in print was perhaps the last step in closing that chapter of research. Closely following the printed article, you received a set of reprints (your article printed on glossy paper in all its glory) that you could distribute to friends, colleagues, and others. Researchers (often from faraway lands) who did not have access to your article would send out reprint requests usually via airmail (indicating the urgency of wanting to read your work). The very notion that someone, who you probably had never met, took the time to learn about your research (remember there was no Google) and sent you a rather expensive request (airmail was certainly not cheap) gave a lot of personal satisfaction that your contribution, while it may not have changed the world, had at least piqued the interest of others in the field. The advent of the Internet certainly took away most of the thrill of knowing your article was being discovered by others in the field. Airmail requests gave way to eMail (free and sometimes impersonal), and with greater bandwidths and changes in publishing methods, research journals are much more accessible across the world now than they were ever before. While there may be a few requests for full-texts on social network sites, by and large it is hard to say who is reading your work unless it has been cited in other papers. The information superhighway is a dense, well-connected network and offers you opportunities to go many places. However, the “research lanes” on this highway are getting congested and there are many journals and other outlets to get information out in the open. The number of researchers working on any given problem has risen exponentially. Publications and most importantly their potential impact on the field and society at large now play a greater role in career advancement and research funding decisions creating high pressure not only to get your research out the door quickly but also to make sure it receives the necessary visibility and recognition. Publishing a paper in a reputable journal was perhaps sufficient in the past to showcase your work to the world. Getting a paper published these days is like getting onto a crowded interstate during rush hour. However difficult it is to do so, you are still one of many vehicles on the road. It is highly unlikely others will stop in awe no matter how fancy your vehicle looks. In a similar vein, just because your paper has been published does not guarantee it will be noticed. The phrase “promoting your research publication” may once have had a bad connotation in academic circles, but in the congested and highly competitive research arena of today, it is an essential step to ensure your research reaches the intended audience and has the impact it rightly deserves. A published paper is not simply an archive of your completed research that has been vetted by your peers, but an important first step in demonstrating to the world the value added by your research endeavors. It is imperative your research is not shrouded in the virtual cobwebs of the journal home page, but is an agent of change that fuels additional research and helps push the frontiers of science and leads to the betterment of society. Your paper must be properly promoted to make sure the published research is visible and reaches a wide range of targeted audiences globally and in a timely manner. In my view the promotion of research articles is a team sport. The publisher, the editorial team, the professional society to which the journal belongs, and, most importantly, the authors all have important roles to play. The editorial team of the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) has therefore been working closely with our publisher Wiley and the marketing staff of our professional society, the American Water Resources Association (AWRA), to take advantage of cutting-edge innovations in the publishing industry to ensure widespread dissemination of articles published in JAWRA. I want to take this opportunity to briefly describe some new and innovative changes being planned and which will be rolled out over the next few months. As an incoming editor-in-chief, these changes are indeed exciting. However, I will be remiss if I do not highlight certain key features of our journal that have withstood the test of time and made us the preeminent scholarly publication on multidisciplinary water research. I want to reiterate my commitment to the fundamental tenets on which JAWRA has been built as we step into our 54th year of publication. Finally, I will close out by providing some ideas on how you, the author, can help promote your research and point to some resources that can help you do so effectively. Our journal web page will be undergoing a face lift in coming months. We all know a picture is worth a thousand words and eye-catching graphics with an informative caption will likely create greater interest in published work than plain text alone. Therefore, working with Wiley, we will be introducing a featured image carousel on the journal home page to highlight research published in the journal. Vector-based graphics not only provide crisp displays of information but can also be “read” and as such indexed by search engines. You as authors can help us present some compelling graphical content and increase traffic to your article, and using vector graphics can further optimize your article to be found and indexed by search engines. Over the last 54 years JAWRA has published some very outstanding papers on a variety of topics. JAWRA's featured series are a group of three or more related papers on a specific topic that are published over multiple issues. Featured series provide great flexibility in organizing papers of topical interest and allow their publication to be staggered. However, the content being spread over multiple issues, and sometimes multiple volumes, is often seen as a constraint in getting maximal exposure. The editorial team will be closely working with Wiley to develop virtual issue landing pages for featured series and other previously published papers of topical interest. Papers that are part of a collection generally have a greater chance of being discovered and are known to get twice as more citations than they normally would. Virtual issues are also a great way to provide focused content to the readership of JAWRA. We certainly would appreciate you letting us know of potential topics of interest for which we can create virtual issues. Highlighting key findings of your research in a clear and concise manner is a crucial element in promoting your journal article on social media. A 140 character or less micro-encapsulation of your research article will be required as part of your submissions in coming months and a new section called Research Impact Statement will be added to the journal article to quickly highlight the significance of your research article. We will be working with the AWRA marketing team to tweet out select research impact statements which are of high relevance to water policy, management, and policy endeavors with appropriate hashtags to your affiliations to make your work more visible in the governmental sector and easily picked up by media outlets. We are also working closely with our production and marketing team at Wiley to streamline our efforts toward nominating papers for publicity and press releases. The nominated papers, if selected by Wiley, will be part of their marketing campaigns and these papers could be unlocked temporarily for promotional purposes providing greater access to accompany their promotion. Reviewers are unsung heroes who help turn a good paper into a great one. The behind the scene efforts of these volunteers are vital to ensure the paper not only meets the rigors of science but the content is also presented in a lucid manner. Constructive reviews therefore play a major and often underrecognized role in making it easy to promote a paper and ensure its contents are readily understood by the readership. Reviewers also play a crucial role in keeping the clutter off the publication highway by rejecting substandard papers and those that do not push the boundaries of science. The increase in journals and papers submitted for publications has put a great stress on reviewers. Providing good reviews takes a great deal of time and commitment. JAWRA has a long tradition of publishing reviewer names in the last issue of the year as a thank you and a way to document their efforts. I am very proud of this practice which has been discontinued by many journals due to space constraints. JAWRA also has recently partnered with Publons (www.publons.com) to make it easy for reviewers of the journal to keep track and document their reviewing efforts. We will also be recognizing outstanding reviewers during the AWRA annual meeting which is held in November each year and on the journal web page. We continue to look forward to finding other ways to make reviewing for JAWRA a positive and rewarding experience and I look forward to any input and suggestions you may have. As the author of the paper you are the “quarterback” of your article promotion game. You have the best knowledge about who should be reading your paper. There are several great articles and blogs on how to promote your published article. I recommend you spend some time reviewing them. I want to emphasize here article promotion should not be an after the fact effort but integrated into all parts of the publication process. As you develop your manuscript, make sure you have a compelling title, an information packed abstract, and pay attention to the way your article is structured. Headings, key words, and even table and figure captions can be useful in indexing your work and being found and ranked highly by search engines. Make sure your citations are relevant and when appropriate show connections to your previous works. Take reviewer comments seriously to improve your presentation. If reviewers find some sections of your manuscript to be dry and disconnected, others likely will too. Make use of Supporting Information (SI) to provide additional details on methods, present model codes, and give access to useful data. SI along with the abstract is generally made freely available and as such is likely to get noticed more than other parts of your paper. We at JAWRA strongly encourage sharing of your datasets as it not only increases the level of reproducibility but also opens new avenues of research which will invariably cite your work. Wiley has a short write-up on search engine optimization of your paper which can be found at — https://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileyblackwell/pdf/SEOforAuthorsLINKSrev.pdf. It is a great starting point to learn more about how to make your article visible to search engines and thus the entire world. Sharing information about your paper and URL links to the final published article on social network sites (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and research network sites (Research Gate, Mendeley, and others) is highly recommended. Wiley has some good blogs on how to promote your work on Facebook (https://hub.wiley.com/community/exchanges/discover/blog/2015/01/15/5-tips-for-promoting-your-research-through-facebook) and LinkedIn (https://hub.wiley.com/community/exchanges/discover/blog/2014/05/01/how-to-promote-your-work-through-linkedin?referrer=exchanges). YouTube videos and your own institutional websites are also important avenues to promote your research. Other useful information related to this topic can be found on the Wiley Network (https://hub.wiley.com/community/exchanges/) which has a wealth of information on the publishing process. Kudos (https://www.growkudos.com/) is a free platform to explain your research in plain language and increase the visibility of your research. You can track the impacts of your work by counting clicks, citations, downloads, and views on Kudos. JAWRA also has adopted a new preprint policy and will consider for review articles previously available as preprints on noncommercial servers such as ArXiv, bioRxiv, psyArXiv, SocArXiv, engrXiv, etc. Authors may also post the submitted version of their manuscript to noncommercial servers at any time. Authors are requested to update any prepublication versions with a link to the final published article. There is a growing recognition citations of articles in journals is not the only metric of interest to funders and policy makers. Many articles in JAWRA arise from mission-driven research performed by federal, state, and local agencies. The direct and immediate impact of these papers may therefore not be captured in other journals but the work is likely to be cited in technical reports, websites, policy statements, and other nontraditional and practitioner-oriented avenues. With this in mind, JAWRA provides “Article Level Metrics” or Altmetric scores for journal articles to track the citations of the paper in nontraditional outlets. We encourage our authors to keep track of this score to harness the full impact of their work in the field of water resources. As a multidisciplinary forum on water resources, we want to cater to a wide range of audiences and present the right mix of theory and applications in our journal. The publication landscape has changed considerably in recent years; the volume of research publication has seen rapid expansion and proliferation, thanks to the Internet. Gone are the days when publishing in a reputable journal was sufficient for others to find your work. The published paper does not just represent a record of your research but is a tool to present your findings to a broader audience. Promoting your published paper is now a necessary aspect of research. Working closely with Wiley we are rolling out several exciting features to help improve the visibility of your research while remaining committed to our core-principle of providing timely and constructive reviews to make your publication the best it can be. We encourage you to learn more about ways to promote your article and work with us to ensure your results and findings are disseminated widely and in a timely manner. I look forward to hearing back from you and finding other ways to further promote your published work and through it make JAWRA the journal of choice for multidisciplinary research in water resources. I can be reached via JAWRA-EIC@awra.org.