In episode three of the film, Nicholas Pontas stresses the importance of publishing. Indeed, the main output of scientists consists of publications, above all, papers in scientific journals. In these publications, they communicate the results of their research or scholarly work. But publications also enable scientists to establish priority for their discoveries, and to build a reputation among their peers. If you aim for a scientific career, your publication list is probably your most important asset. Publishing your work, however, is not a simple and straightforward process. There are several thorny issues confronting a scientific author. For now, I want to discuss two of them, authorship, and choice of journal. First then, there's the question of authorship. Especially in the world of science, most publications have multiple authors nowadays. It's not always easy to decide who should and who should not be included in the list of authors. And there's also the matter of the order of the authors, which may indicate the importance of their contribution. So the question here is, who gets the credit, and how much? In general, the top spot is at the end of the list, where we find the principal investigator, or senior author. Usually a person who runs the lab, or set up the project. The first author is often a graduate student or a postdoc, who actually did most of the work. Being a first author is highly important for young scientists who aim for an academic career. Then there may be several authors in the middle. Often it's hard to tell whether they contributed a lot, or just a little to the paper. Sometimes authors are listed more so as a courtesy than because they made a genuine contribution. Such authors are known as guest authors. They may also be listed because of their reputation, so as to enhance chances of publication. And the opposite phenomenon also occurs. For instance, some pharmaceutical companies engage medical writers to draft manuscripts. These contributors, so-called ghost writers, are not listed as authors on the paper. Instead, the company invites a big academic name to headline the paper as a guest author. Now clearly, such practices are highly questionable. Allocation of authorship is often a contentious issue. In general, to avoid conflicts, it is highly advisable to discuss authorship issues at the start of a project, rather than in the end phase. Now let us move on to the next issue facing a scientific author, the choice of journal. In making this choice, there are several factors that you have to take into account, such as visibility or prestige, speed, and accessibility. Usually, scientists prefer to publish their work in prestigious, high-impact journals. Publishing in such a prestigious journal increases the visibility of your work and benefits your career. Such journals, however, also have a very high rejection rate. So if you aim too high and get rejected, you may lose precious time. And indeed, time can be an important factor. The more so when you are competing with other groups working on the same topic. In the scientific reward system, all credit is accorded to the first research program to discover a particular fact or explanation. Clearly, it is a winner-takes-all race. The conventional publication track, involving manuscript submission, peer review, manuscript revision and production, often spans several month. Some journals, however, manage to speed up the process, each part taking weeks rather than month. So if you are in a hurry, such a journal might be your first choice. Finally, you have to decide whether you want your paper to be freely accessible to all potential readers. Or whether you prefer to publish in a journal which limits access to subscribers. The first option implies publishing in so-called open access journals. The number of open access journals is growing rapidly. Still, the choice might not be as obvious as it seems. For one, open access journals often demand a considerable fee from the authors, even up to $3,000. In such journals, the processing costs are charged to the authors, rather than to readers or subscribers. This approach is known as gold open access. This specific business model has raised some obvious concerns. For one, article processing charges could exclude authors from developing countries, or less well-funded research fields. Besides, if publishers make a profit from accepting papers, they have a clear incentive to accept almost anything submitted, rather than select the best articles. Another way to achieve open access, without having to pay an author fee, is known as green open access. This amounts to publishing a paper in a conventional journal, and then self-archiving it in a repository where it can be accessed for free. This can be an institutional repository, or also a central repository such as PubMed. Some publishers, however, require considerable delays on when a paper in the repository may be made open access. Now some of the most prestigious journals, such as Nature and Science, do not support open access. And of course, few researchers are able to resist the temptation of appearing in such high-ranking journals. Still, the choice may not be fully yours, for many scientific funding agencies have made open access mandatory for any research that receives their financial support. For this and other reasons, more and more publications are open access. One way or another, open access seems to be the future.
