Online Advice from a Publisher

Welcome to our last blog post of 2009. I hope the year has gone well for you.

Recently Julie Walker             at INASP mentioned that the publisher Elsevier has some good resources for authors. She suggested linking the resources to a blog post. Good idea, Julie!

These resources provide advice on writing and publishing journal articles. Although the resources are mainly for researchers early in their careers, others also can learn from them.

The resources include the following:

• An article on workshops that Elsevier is giving for authors. (Note: The article includes useful advice from the workshops. For example, it states that when writing a paper, the author should focus mainly on what the paper can communicate to others, not how publishing it can help the author's career.)
• A video of a presentation, about 1 hour 45 minutes long, titled “How to Write a World Class Paper”.
• A PDF file of the slides from a version of this presentation. (Note: If you have trouble viewing the video, for example because of low bandwidth, you can get the main points just by looking at the slides.)
• A section in which editors answer questions such as “To which journal should I submit my research?” and “What makes a good title?”
• A Web page providing links to some of these resources and some related resources.

We hope you’ll find these resources helpful. And we wish you an excellent 2010.

Until next year! —Barbara