STEP 9: Publication

There are many ways in which to disseminate scientific work (Bourne, 2005; see Step 10) or are summarized in ARIADNE. Preprints facilitate early access to the manuscript, which helps researchers to document their scientific or academic work and may even be used to assert priority (e.g. ➜ MetaArXiv or ➜ BioArXiv). Preprint publication often happens simultaneously with the submission to the target journal of choice. The accessibility and reception of a preprint may make it easier to assess the quality of scientific work than bold claims about the novelty or impact of the work (Brembs, 2019). However, be aware that some journals prohibit the upload of preprints (➜ Sherpa Romeo). Additionally, fellow researchers who have access to this work may provide comments that may be useful for a critical re-evaluation of the manuscript, which might also happen simultaneously to its peer review at a journal (see Table 1). Most journals ask researchers to submit the manuscript together with a cover letter (see Table 1). The cover letter allows researchers to demonstrate the relevance and quality of their work. However, some journals also actively discourage the submission of a cover letter to let the manuscript “speak for itself”. Once the manuscript is under review, reviewers might raise more or less critical issues about the manuscript and inform the editor handling your paper (Suls et al., 2009). More often, the editor then recommends either acceptance, minor revisions (both rarely happen on the first submission), major revisions (sometimes also called revise and resubmit; see Table 1), or rejection. Addressing each issue raised by the reviewers in a well-crafted, point-by-point response rebuttal letter (Palminteri, 2023; see Table 1) allows researchers to demonstrate that criticized parts of the manuscript have been revised to an extent that warrants the acceptance of the manuscript (Noble, 2017) or to argue why suggested changes have not been adapted. Following acceptance, researchers may think about publishing their data and code together with the manuscript in a way that allows easy access to and reuse of the work (Goodman et al., 2014). This process until seeing your paper published can take several months (in rare cases even years) and this time should be factored in Step 1, where a time plan of the project is first fixed. If your manuscript is rejected by your first journal choice, a submission to an alternative journal of equal or slightly lower rank is usually warranted. Only in exceptional cases an appeal could be considered. Crucially, if you notice an error only after publication (e.g., a software bug or faulty code/input data), this should be discussed with the co-authors and corrected in the published article as soon as possible (Bruns et al., 2019).