An early career workshop on the theme of strategic publishing achieves rich discussions and useful insight for emerging researchers at Warwick.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of running an Accolade workshop session for our early career researcher fellows on the topic of strategic publishing. I’ve facilitated a couple of other sessions on this topic in recent years, to a warm reception, although on both occasions I’d run these as panel discussions with invited scholars. My feeling was then, and probably still is now, that my own frame of reference and experience only has so much to offer on this topic and can only be enriched through a diversity of voices. This was rather validated as a key takeaway from those sessions was how there is ‘no one path’ to achieving a successful strategic publishing strategy.
Now for yesterday’s event I had been invited at fairly short notice [1] to step in to replace another session from a senior speaker which had been cancelled.
The limited preparation time available rather precluded gathering a panel of experts, who normally need a month or two’s advance warning to be available. However, given feedback from previous panels included how fellows would appreciate a more instructional rather than discursive session, I was heartened by the thought that a one-man-show could still deliver a satisfying and valuable couple of hours. However, as I explained to the fellows at the outset how the afternoon had been drawn together rapidly, I craved their indulgence for any elements which might be a ‘little rough’ around the edges.[2] That aside, reflecting on the session, I was fairly happy with how it went although I hope the virtual attendees were able to learn from it as much as those in the room – it remains incredibly difficult to ‘be fully present’ as a facilitator in both spaces at once, and I’m indebted here to my colleague Hannah Straw for her efforts in keeping those on Teams engaged.
I had been concerned, as I always am when preparing any teaching, that I wouldn’t have sufficient content to last through my time slot. I need not have worried, as it was clear 90 minutes in that I would actually have to only lightly explore the final session elements so as to not run over. As a delegate nothing frustrates me more than a workshop which gives no sign of actually ending, so I am always sensitive to ensuring I can release people to their own devices and discussions on time! Interestingly, the major reason we were in danger of overstaying my welcome, was down to the very receptive audience having so much to say, ask and discuss with me and their fellows.[3] It certainly made for a very energised room, and naturally, my thanks to everyone who attended and participated: especially Hannah for the invitation in the first place.
For the curious, strategic publishing can be defined as attempts to marshal a scholar’s outputs into some form of ‘intentional and well-planned approach’ , rather than simply publishing each work in isolation. The idea is that this both systematises, priorities and delineates the processes each scholar is working on, alongside aligning it with their career goals, research aspirations and funder/institutional properties. The end-goal of strategic publishing then is to increase an individual’s professional visibility and reputation alongside maximising the research’s impact and reception by desired audiences. To this end, I offered a couple of conceptualisations and models for the fellows to follow – but as noted above, stressing the lack of any ‘one true way’. I also took great pains to highlight the potential personal costs, in terms of stress and burnout from setting overly ambitious goals. Perhaps hard for such potential high-fliers to hear, but I’ve worked with more than a few early career academics who have experienced this burnout, so am acutely aware of the risks to health, well-being and even careers. It was good to hear this point echoed by the senior fellows in the room, with the advice to ‘start small and then snowball’ rather than trying to achieve too much in a short span of time.
Around this framework then, the delegates and myself were able to enjoy a wide-range of interesting points of discussion during the session. While I won’t go into detail here [4] these included but weren’t limited to: country differences in publishing and esteem recognition, overcoming the ‘fear’ of submission, the complexity of the ‘free-labour’ basis of publishing, difficulties with reviewers, dealing with editors and feedback and many more. One very interesting sidebar I had with one of our more senior fellows (hello Dino!) was around a point I’d made about early career scholars needing to bring their ‘A game’ to publishing efforts. This perception is based on many years’ experience dealing with submissions to the journal where it’s clear the author has expended the bare minimum of effort to transform a chapter or essay, or in creating an original work, and expect to ‘scrape a pass’ with it. Now, in academic publishing though, such an attitude is doomed to failure and almost certain desk rejection and associated heartache for the author – and no small amount of frustration for the editor too! Certainly, the fate of the vast majority of such underdeveloped papers I’ve overseen editorially has been such a rapid and ignoble end. I was also pleased to hear one or two fellows who’d been peer-reviewers already commenting they’d also seen, and recommended declining, such work, for similar reasons.
The counterpoint though to this ‘good enough isn’t good enough’ argument, is that it risks feeding into the authentic and palpable fear many scholars feel about exposing their work to the publication process. Hence, being prepared to make efforts, but also being able to eventually rationalise ‘my woir IS good enough to submit’ is important too. I agree, and confess I spend a lot of time talking to prospective authors offering such encouragement! So, perhaps ‘good enough will be good enough’ – provided you are prepared to put the time and effort in! Certainly, on Exchanges where it is clear whenever an author has worked hard on drafted, redrafting, proofing and finalising an article, these are the ones which tend to have a much more successful transition towards publishing. So, I think for any future training I might find a way to temper this aphorism to incorporate a little bit of positivity and encouragement. Suggestions certainly welcome in this respect!
For now though, I can put my thoughts on strategic publishing to one side – and consider some of the more routine editorial tasks for a while. Although, as I’m running a session on publishing for post-graduate researchers in about 6 weeks, I’ll try and incorporate some of the lessons and insights from this workshop into that event!
As always, I welcome comments, insights and thoughts on this fascinating topic.
Endnotes
[1] About 6 working days give or take. Being me, naturally I said ‘Yes, of course I can run something!’ I might need to take my own advice one day about being overly ambitious in what I can achieve!
[2] Not to say that I had laboured for a couple of days to bring the session up to a sufficiently professional standard – I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to lecturing and training! Only that I wished I’d had more lead time to really make the session ‘pop’ slightly more coherently.
[3] I had been tempted to run the whole session as one long group and small group discussion. I think this might have worked, but difficult to say as this was mostly a new group of fellows I’d not interacted much with – so didn’t want to prejudge how ‘chatty’ they would be! I also suspect we wouldn’t have been able to unpick and challenge some of the assumptions around publishing as successfully.
[4] I was focused on facilitating, rather than note taking, so I suspect any of the delegates will be able to provide a far more accurate reportage of the event’s contents.
Exchanges Editorial Discourses 
