Early career researchers and their publishing and authorship practices

Abstract

This study presents findings from the first year of the Harbingers research project, a 3-year longitudinal study of early career researchers (ECRs), which sought to ascertain current and changing habits in scholarly communication. The study recruited 116 science and social science ECRs from seven countries who were subject to in-depth interviews, and this paper reports on findings regarding publishing and authorship practices and attitudes. A major objective was to determine whether ECRs are taking the myriad opportunities proffered by new digital innovations, developing within the context of open science, open access, and social media, to publish their research. The main finding is that these opportunities are generally not taken because ECRs are constrained by convention and the precarious employment environment they inhabit and know what is bestfor them, which is to publish (in high impact factor journals) or perish.

Peer review: The experience and views of early career researchers

“…Being the productive authors that they are, having published an average of 10 articles and six conference proceedings in their relatively short careers (Nicholas et al ., 2017a), our ECRs are quite familiar with peer review. Thus, 85% said they had experience in responding to comments from peer reviewers with respect to papers they had written (Table ).…”

Socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals

“…Their choices do vary, but should not be driven by the rankings and impact factors that plague universities and make or break academic careers. Evidence suggests that at present, early career researchers support non-commercial publishing, but cannot pursue it to the degree they wish (Nicholas et al 2017). Steinberg (2015) is incorrect when he says that publication in non-commercial OA scholarly society geography journals is difficult -there are still plenty of those, as I have shown through my own survey.…”

Question all assumptions: Learned Publishing at 30

“…PLOS One , F1000Research, Frontiers journals), the basic model remains persistent. Perhaps the reason for this is that the model continues to fulfil the needs of academia (Nicholas et al, ). For tenure, promotion, and job security researchers are still required to publish, and to publish in ‘quality’ journals.…”

“…Pricing and value were hot topics in the 1990s and early 2000s (Cox, ; Singleton, ), and although there are few recent articles that directly talk about pricing, there are many articles that discuss the value‐added services that publishers add (see, e.g. the January 2017 issue on discoverability, and Nicholas et al, ). One of the value‐added services, managing the peer review services (which, of course, rely on the good will of researchers and academics), is a perennial topic, with over 50 articles published in the journal asking how we can improve the reviewing process and provide proper reward and recognition (e.g.…”