A 360 degree view of journal publishing
Highlights
- You have been a researcher for over 20 years and have been published in several prestigious journals. How have your choices on where to publish changed over the years? 01:12
- How important is the impact factor or altmetric score for a researcher? How does your institution view these metrics? 10:40
- Your journal is run by researchers for researchers in your community. Tell us more about your philosophy and how your community participates in its evolution. 28:10
- What innovations have you seen from the publishing industry that has helped speed up the research process? 47:04
- What do you see as the future for journal publishing? 50:50
Continue the Conversation
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Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam
ProfessorIIT Madras
Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam is Professor of Civil Engineering at IIT-Madras. Dr. Mahalingam’s current research interests include Public Private Partnerships in Infrastructure, and ways in which organizations react to the globalization of engineering services. He also serves as the editor of the Engineering Project Organization journal. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech from IIT Madras.
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It was very interesting to hear how the author experience has changed over the years!
What if an author is given a chance to select the reviewer?
The danger is that if authors end up selecting their ‘friends’ the peer review process may end up being biased. Hence, in many journals authors are asked to identify potential referees, the editor selects one from this list and one or two from outside and proceeds with the process. This way, theoretically, the authors get a say and the process is rigorous. Hope this makes sense?
Thank you.
Fantastic session loved it
Thank you!
Discoverability. Was and still is such a big issue!
It certainly is getting better but I do agree a lot more remains to be done.
Agreed – it is easier to search today but there is also so much clutter. There are certainly ways in which we can improve regarding this aspect.
excellent session. Very insightful observations from Dr Mahalingam from an author cum editor’s perspective. One problem that the editors often face is the responsibility to maintain certain uniform standard between issues of the journal in order to retain readers’ interest. I am sure Dr Mahalingam would have faced this. Any comments from him on how he handled this?
This is a great question. To be honest we often do not do very much about the articles in an issue and try to finesse this by writing a compelling editorial that may convince readers to read what might be perceived as a ‘weaker issue’. If you have a journal with enough throughput/volume, then it becomes possible to shuffle articles around a bit (not abide strictly by the first come first served rule) so that issues are equally compelling. While I’ve seen this occasionally it is certainly the exception and not the rule!
Hi Ashwin and Ravi, very good session, fully agree that we should expand on publication diversity, to include multi-media.
But also challenging the Journal and Books silos. Particularly for books: academics need to be better supported to dissect the content they provide.
Thanks for your kind comments. Good point on better support that is needed for book authors.