Guest Post: Sessions for Journal Authors and Referees Accompany International Astronomical Union General Assembly

[This post is by Richard de Grijs, who is deputy editor of The Astrophysical Journal (Letters). Thanks very much, Richard!]

Once every 3 years, the International Astronomical Union holds its general assembly, a large conference covering most topics in contemporary astrophysics. During the last 2 weeks of August, the Chinese Astronomical Society hosted some 3,000 professional astronomers and astrophysicists from every inhabited continent, who had descended on Beijing for the general assembly.

At the general assembly, for the first time, the editors and editorial boards of all major society-based journals in the field jointly held sessions on scientific writing and the peer-review process. The sessions were aimed at junior authors and freshly minted referees.

In all, 194 participants attended the sessions, which were highly interactive. We covered the main themes of “Writing a good paper”, “Submitting to a journal”, and “The peer-review process”.

The morning sessions addressed the planning required to eventually lead to high-quality scientific articles; discussion topics included avoiding common errors. The afternoon sessions focused on how to select an appropriate journal to submit to, what the next steps are in the editorial process, and how to respond to referees’ reports.

All participants indicated that the sessions were useful or very useful, and that they would use the lessons learned. We promoted AuthorAID as a potential route to obtain further help and support. From a personal perspective, I found it very useful to have extensive direct interactions with editors from many other journals in the field.

The main contributors to the materials used for our presentations were Nicola Gulley (Institute of Physics Publishing, UK), Paula Szkody (Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, USA) and James Wicker (Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, China). Additional thanks are due to Chris Biemesderfer (American Astronomical Society, USA) for his initiative to organize these sessions.