Our Story

Since 2002 Editage has been helping authors the world over achieve their publication goals, through services like academic editing and publication support. During the course of our interactions with authors in helping them get published, we have realized that researchers are eager to learn and are always looking for resources and someone to guide them through the publication process. More importantly, given the scarcity of resources in their native language, researchers in non-native English-speaking (NNES) countries are often cut off from new developments in the rapidly evolving publishing industry in the West.

Our interactions with authors made us aware of the existence of a distinct gap—between authors and journals, early-career and senior researchers, and East and West.

In order to understand the extent of this gap, in 2012, we conducted a research survey with authors and journals. Our objectives were to

  1. Identify the challenges NNES authors in the East face in getting their work published in international journals.

  2. Understand the perspectives of western journal editors regarding the challenges authors face.

  3. Suggest recommendations to bridge gaps between the perspectives of authors and journals.

Our survey findings were presented at the 2013 Council of Science Editors annual meeting and published in Learned Publishing. The results revealed that.

Authors were seeking

  1. Greater transparency from journals about their manuscript selection processes and criteria

  2. Information in the authors’ native language about publication ethics

  3. Guidelines for communicating with journal editors and peer reviewers, and

  4. A real-time way to ask experts for advice as they navigated through the publication process

Journals were seeking that authors be educated about

  1. The need for their manuscript to match the journal scope

  2. How to frame cover letters and responses to reviewer comments

  3. How journals deal with research misconduct.

Thus, there emerged a clear need for not just author education but, more importantly, author education in the authors’ native language, and a common forum on which journal editors and authors globally could communicate with each other.

As a third-party organization working with both authors and journals, we at Editage felt that we were in the right position to offer a platform to facilitate communication among these key industry players and thus help bridge the gap. We felt that a global platform that could reach out to researchers across career stages and educate NNES authors about hot trends in the industry was the need of the hour and could be of immense value to the publishing industry. Our research and brainstorming efforts in this line of thought led to the creation of Editage Insights.