Navigating the increasingly complex and treacherous scientific publishing landscape

8 March 2023 – Howard Browman presented a lecture – remotely via ZOOM – on “Navigating the increasingly complex and treacherous scientific publishing landscape” to the British Antarctic Survey and the Natural Environment Research Council, UK.

Abstract of the talk
My first article was published in 1986. The landscape of scientific publishing was much simpler then, and slower. It was not unusual for it to take 1-3 years to get an article published. If your manuscript was rejected by more than two or three high quality journals, you would have been advised to retire it. Times have changed. I doubt if anyone retires a manuscript anymore, no matter how many journals reject it; it is no longer a matter of whether you will publish an article, only where. Authors now want things to happen, fast; I would argue, too fast. They expect their article to be published within 3-6 months of submitting it. Today, authors are faced with a rapidly shifting and increasingly complex and treacherous scientific publishing landscape – open science; experiments with peer review; group authorship; open access; predatory publishers-journals; preprints/post-publication review; use of artificial intelligence; and more. Hopefully, I will tell you some things about all of this that you do not already know.