Guest post in The Scholarly Kitchen: A case for universal and simplified journal systems
Editage global author survey
A large-scale global author survey conducted by Editage highlighted the perspectives of academic authors on a broad range of topics related to scholarly publishing. Nearly 7,000 authors offered their views on publication processes, journal communication, ethical issues, open access, and the changes they would like to see in journal publishing. This series covers the main report based on the overall findings and several follow-up articles and reports that took a deep dive into specific topics.
If you are a researcher, you have almost certainly grumbled about journal guidelines, systems, or processes at least once—either in informal conversations with your colleagues or through blog posts and social media. Have you ever wondered how pervasive this sentiment is within the global researcher community? Or how seriously the community wants problems with journal guidelines and systems addressed? If yes, this guest post in The Scholarly Kitchen will answer your questions.
The post presents findings from a large-scale global author survey conducted by Editage, which showed that complexity in journal systems, processes, and guidelines was among the top five problems in academic publishing that authors wanted addressed.
It discusses four prominent author perspectives that emerged on this topic:
- Journal guidelines should be simple and clear
- Formatting requirements should be standardized/harmonized
- Submission systems need to be universal
- Too much time is wasted in journal submission and formatting
Toward the end, the post suggests potential measures that can be taken by the academic publishing community to make things easier for researchers by bringing about a reasonable level of standardization in journal systems and submission requirements. It also provides a checklist that journals can use to evaluate their systems/guidelines from an author’s perspective and to determine how author experience can be improved.
Read the entire post on The Scholarly Kitchen if you’d like to see actual author quotes and go through the proposed suggestions.
If you’re interested in reading more about the Editage survey, you can download the Editage Global Author Survey Report and the follow-up Editage report on changes authors want to see.
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