Scientific Publishing From The Inside Out, Nick Wigginton, Science Magazine

Summary

Scientific publishing is about selecting novel researches with good quality and unique scope in broad interest to communicate with others via various media. It has strict and efficient publish system, including submission, editor evaluation, peer reviewing, revision and response, etc. Scientists should plan to publish when starting a research project.

Critique

Dr. Wigginton gave a brilliant talk about general scientific publishing, Science’s publish system and suggestion for scientific authors. First, he introduced history of scientific publishing and Science magazine. Then he explained each step of publish model, e.g. submission vs. acceptation and rejection, peer review referees, source of scientific output and problems editors facing. His talk matches our broad interest and need about how to scientifically communicate our researches with others. The intense competition among rising submissions requires new researcher higher quality of manuscripts. Thus ability of writing scientific papers is much more essential. As more funding invested in scientific research and more interesting results discovered, higher efficiency of scientific communication is required to catch up with the pace of output. And scientific communication is a worldwide activity. International background of the authors, whose first language is not English, should also be considered, so scientific papers should be concise and brief. Since I’m taking BioWriting course now, there is much information that is great supplementary to what I get from class, such as magazines’ preference when evaluating submissions, things need to be done before submission. It surprised me that there are more biological topics than physical science topics in Science magazine. And ethics involved in scientific publishing is new to me. The examples of climate change rhetoric and plastic fantasy are so interesting and make me think about what we should double check during preparation. My current research, to be published, is a project set in the Tibetan Plateau, which has unique and extreme environment and is worth peoples’ attention. That may increase my chance to be published after submission, based on Dr. Wigginton’s talk taking dinosaurs as an example. Overall, it’s a great seminar and I learned a lot form it.