Speaker 1: Where to publish in which journal can be a rather complicated affair for a number of reasons. It is a decision that is made at a number of levels. It can be at the institutional level, there can be some important regulations at your lab, and you can be having personal preferences. But before you go on this decision-making process, make sure that you know your institutions and your lab's publication policy. At the top level is what's the publisher. So some publishers are inherently undesirable because of their policies. I don't necessarily mean here predatory publishers, which are generally undesirable and are not worthy of further discussion, but I mean major publishers. For example, our lab boycotts all Elsevier journals. Elsevier is a major scientific publisher because of the fact that we have no access to their journals in Germany, we don't review for them, we don't serve on editorial boards, and we also don't submit any papers there. So for example, if you work in our lab here, Elsevier is not an option for you. That's sort of the first level. The second level in an important discussion is the perceived prestige of a journal, which is often but not always congruent with the so-called impact factor, which most of you will have already heard of, right? It's a mathematically deeply flawed number that's very frequently publicized widely and tells you how often a paper in the journal is on average cited up to two years after its appearance. We can talk about the impact factor another time. Matter of fact is it's not recommended. Nevertheless, most people still use it because it is a simple number. It gives you sort of a guide as to what is the prestige of the journal, and very often the prestige of the journal and the impact factor number align quite well, but there are some exceptions to that rule. For example, in our field, sort of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, so PNAS, doesn't have an astronomically high impact factor, but it's certainly way up there in terms of prestige. Why is prestige important? Well, it gives you visibility, first of all, and of course it also looks great on your CV if you have papers in more desirable journals. What this entails is that you have to judge what is sort of, you have to gauge what is sort of the importance of your study, and you know, you have to compare that with the level of studies that appear in a given journal to see if that's realistic. That's not so easy to do. It requires quite a bit of experience, and what also factors into this decision is your personal risk aversion, or how prepared are you to basically take that risk and be rejected, because the higher the prestige of the journal, of course, the higher the risk of getting rejected, just even a desk rejection, so without the paper even being sent out for review, it gets editorially rejected more often than at other journals, if the journal is a journal of high prestige. And it also is a bit of your own personal philosophy, you know. I mean, it's somewhere in between, you don't want to send everything to nature, right, because, or science, because chances are most of the time you'll get rejected, or almost always will you be rejected, but also you don't want to completely undersell your work and always just go the safe route, and where it's likely to be accepted no matter what. I mean, this is a personal choice, you have to make your own peace with it, or talk with your mentor. Our philosophy in the lab is, you know, don't undersell your work, make sure you, if you have an exciting result, you also try to land it in a highly prestigious journal, but attitudes here can can definitely differ. What you also have to balance is the relatively high risk of rejection in these prestigious journals, versus the need to get a paper out very fast, for example, when you, because, for example, you need to for a grant application, or something like this, that will also then, you know, after a while, because, be important, because if you send it to the prestigious journals, chances are that you'll get rejected, and so you will have to sort of go through a cascading list of journals, and that costs simply time. If you send it, let's say, to a normal journal, maybe it'll appear faster, and one compromise there can be publishing a pre-print, where then the paper is immediately out, immediately accessible to everybody, but hasn't gone through the peer review process, and does not appear in a journal, but you can still cite it, for example. So, a third point is, does the publisher offer a reasonable open access situation, or the particular journal within the publisher, and that pertains to green open access policies, for example, green open access embargo periods, that is, after how many months are you allowed to post a pre-print version of your paper in an open repository, that varies from 0 to 12, or even longer periods of time, and that can be important for you. Also, what is the gold open access cost? Gold open access means you pay a fee, and then your paper immediately becomes open access to everybody, that can be several thousands of euro or dollars, and so then it becomes also important to know, does your institution cover these costs? So, for example, your institution may just cover the cost for certain journals or certain publishers, as is the case in our situation, so then these publishers and these journals become naturally much more attractive, or if there's country-level negotiations, like currently the case with Germany, has negotiated contracts with some major publishers, then publishing their gold open access comes at no cost to you as the lab. So, this can be important to you, you may be inherently interested in having your research be available open access, generally, I think everybody would agree that this is highly desirable, because there are no limits to how your paper can be accessed, or, and your funder may actually mandate open access, in our case, in our lab's case, it's our ERC advance grant from the European Union that mandates all papers be published open access. What's also important in this general context is the pre-print policy, for example, are pre-prints welcome to be published before you submit to this journal, or are the policies rather restrictive, and if you're interested in all of that, what are the various policies pertaining to open access, you can go to the Sherpa Romeo website, I'll put a link for that down in the description, and you can look it up for any journal out there. The fourth point is something maybe that you don't think very often about, and it's the editorial board. Now, the editorial board, you think, you know, may not be so important for this decision, but actually it can be, because if there are really no specialists in your general area on the editorial board, then it's likely that, you know, if there's something about your paper that needs the reviewer or the editor to be aware of how difficult this work is to do, for example, if it's in soil or if it's with organisms that are very difficult to handle, if you don't have a sort of a specialist that is knowledgeable in this general area, then there is a chance that your paper will not receive a reasonable review, because just nobody knows this general area, and so I think sometimes it's worthwhile looking up the editorial board and see if there's a person that could really reasonably handle your paper. The fifth point, past experience, of course, this is very important, you know, how professional have the interactions with you and this journal been in the past. I remember one time back in the day when you still sent actually papers on paper in the mail, there was one quite well-known journal that I got reviews back and actually the editorial board forgot to cut off the reviewer name, so I could see who reviewed my paper. Actually, the paper was not favorably reviewed, and so I thought this was highly unprofessional, and I don't think I sent anything to that journal again in the next 10-15 years. And so, you know, past experience with how professional has the handling been and all that can be important. Also, the speed, you know, has your paper been handled in the past at a reasonable speed, or did you wait six months for a desk rejection, and then there's the full spectrum, of course. And also, of course, have you gotten knowledgeable and helpful reviews from this journal in the past may make you want to send another paper to this particular journal. The sixth point is what audience do you want to reach, and so, you know, maybe this is not very high up on the list, because with search engines, of course, people can generally find your paper if you have optimized it for search engine findings, so, you know, have chosen the right keywords and all that. But sometimes, if you want to speak to the community of fungal biologists, then maybe one of these journals with that sort of perspective is more, is a better option than sending it to, for example, a soils journal or a global change biology journal, because very often you can pick from a number of journal subject areas. But if you want to address a particular community, if you want to, for example, have people change their behavior or consider a particular point in their work, then it makes a lot more sense to just target that particular audience and then pick the fitting journal for that. So, you can see there's really a lot to consider. It's a decision that is not so easy to take. There's just, it's complicated. There's just many things to think about. I think it's very useful, and we typically do that, to sort of have a list of journals that are desirable, and then we communicate with our set of authors, often also on the order in which we send the paper to different journals. And yeah, hopefully this was helpful to you, and good luck with your next paper.