Why climate change and polar research affects you and the rest of the globe!

To reduce our carbon footprint, we simultaneously discontinued the print edition in 2011. That’s another good reason to feel good about reading Polar Research. I’m personally deeply sentimental about printed books and journals – the overflowing bookcases in my home (and cardboard boxes in my mom’s cellar) attest to this. I love feeling the heft of a printed journal in my hands and enjoy flipping through it and perhaps coming across an intriguing article  on a topic apparently unrelated to what I’m looking for, but which may offer an unexpected insight.  But carrying on with the print edition of Polar Research was just too hard to justify in today’s world, and not only for environmental reasons. Scientists are reading differently. They’re not looking at journals from cover to cover, but are instead looking online for the articles they need to help them in their work.

What advice would you give authors for choosing journals to publish in?

Familiarize yourself with the scopes of the journals you’re considering. Try to figure out how much weight they place on such factors as novelty and consider how your paper would measure up in this regard. If you want to make an impact among your colleagues, look especially at the journals that they’re reading and publishing in. If you’d like to reach a much wider audience, consider a multi-disciplinary journal that you may have not paid much attention to before. In other words, think about the readership of the journal and who you want to read your paper.

Another important consideration these days is whether you want to have your paper freely accessible to readers. Are you going to aim for an open-access journal or a traditional journal in which readers pay for access? Be aware that you may have to cough up money in the form of author fees either way. Before you submit your paper anywhere, make sure you know if there are any publishing fees involved and what they amount to. Any reputable journal will make these costs clear up front. Dodgy journals – those associated with so-called “predatory publishers” – typically promise incredibly quick publication but may not mention the fees involved until they slam you with a whopping bill at the end of the process.

Here’s another tip: every time you submit your paper to a different journal (no matter how “lowly”), be sure to reformat it in accordance with that journal’s guidelines. And – it pains me to have to say this –update your cover letter so you get the name of the journal right! Also make sure you try to redress any problems pointed out during the review at the previous journal you submitted to. If the same reviewer who critiqued your manuscript for Journal A ends up reviewing it for Journal B and she sees that you haven’t made any notable effort to fix the flaws she took the time to point out in her review for Journal A, how do you think the reviewer’s report for Journal B is going to look? Not very cheerful, that’s how. 

Why should someone submit to your journal?

Researchers should submit to Polar Research, rather than to a mono-disciplinary journal, if they’re interested in sharing their findings with a broad audience of Arctic and Antarctic researchers and environmental managers.

We also offer rigorous peer review, often through several rounds of revision, which improves authors’ work. And accepted papers are carefully edited. Many contributors have written to thank us for excellent review and editorial services.

If I may, I’d like to comment here on the fact that some people seem to have the misapprehension that a journal that’s issued electronically, without a print edition, must cost peanuts to produce: researchers donate the papers; reviewers critique them for free; and the papers that pass muster are plonked into a digital layout and posted online. Easy and cheap, right? In fact, the process of taking a paper through from submission to final publication – whether in print or electronically or both – involves the efforts of many highly competent professionals, whose work must be paid for. I’ve been tempted to post “before” and “after” versions of an article online just so folks could get a sense of how much work goes on behind the scenes to bring the text and graphics of papers contributed by even well-published authors up to snuff . Readers would be very surprised and some distinguished contributors would be more than a little embarrassed. Naturally, I would never actually do anything like that. My point is that the “value added” during the peer-review, editorial and production processes is typically underappreciated. And, if done to a good standard, it costs. This is why some open-access, electronic-only journals charge publication fees.